Mixed Spectral-Element Method for the Waveguide Problem With Bloch Periodic Boundary Conditions

The mixed spectral-element method (MSEM) is applied to solve the waveguide problem with the Bloch periodic boundary condition (BPBC). Based on the BPBC for the original Helmholtz equation and the periodic boundary condition (PBC) for the equivalent but modified Helmholtz equation, two equivalent mixed variational formulations are applied for the MSEM. Unlike the traditional finite-element method and spectral-element method (SEM), both these mixed SEM schemes are completely free of spurious modes because of their use of the Gauss' law and the curl-conforming vector basis functions structured by the Gauss-Legendre-Lobatto points. A simple implementation method is used to deal with the BPBC and the PBC for the mixed variational formulations so that both schemes can save computational costs over the traditional methods. Several numerical results are also provided to verify that both schemes are free of spurious modes and have high accuracy with the propagation constants.