Calculation of band structure of three dimensional photonic crystals amounts to solving large-scale Maxwell eigenvalue problems, which are notoriously challenging due to high multiplicity of zero eigenvalue. In this paper, we try to address this problem in such a broad context that band structure of three dimensional isotropic photonic crystals with all 14 Bravais lattices can be efficiently computed in a unified framework. We uncover the delicate machinery behind several key results of our work and on the basis of this new understanding we drastically simplify the derivations, proofs and arguments in our framework. In this work particular effort is made on reformulating the Bloch boundary condition for all 14 Bravais lattices in the redefined orthogonal coordinate system, and establishing eigen-decomposition of discrete partial derivative operators by systematic use of commutativity among them, which has been overlooked previously, and reducing eigen-decomposition of double-curl operator to the canonical form of a 3x3 complex skew-symmetric matrix under unitary congruence. With the validity of the novel nullspace free method in the broad context, we perform some calculations on one benchmark system to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our algorithm.

We propose an extension of the computational fluid mechanics approach to the Monge-Kantorovich mass transfer problem, which was developed by Benamou-Brenier. Our extension allows optimal transfer of unnormalized and unequal masses. We obtain a one-parameter family of simple modifications of the formulation in [4]. This leads us to a new Monge-Ampere type equation and a new Kantorovich duality formula. These can be solved efficiently by, for example, the Chambolle-Pock primal-dual algorithm. This solution to the extended mass transfer problem gives us a simple metric for computing the distance between two unnormalized densities. The L1 version of this metric was shown in [23] (which is a precursor of our work here) to have desirable properties.

In this paper, we consider an interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for the time-dependent Maxwell’s equations in cold plasma. In Huang and Li (J. Sci. Comput., 42 (2009), 321–340), for both semi and fully discrete DG schemes, we proved error estimates which are optimal in the energy norm, but sub-optimal in the L2-norm. Here by filling this gap, we show that these schemes are optimally convergent in the L2-norm on quasi-uniform tetrahedral meshes if the solution is sufficiently smooth.

Image segmentation is an important task in the domain of computer vision and medical imaging. In natural and medical images, intensity inhomogeneity, i.e. the varying image intensity, occurs often and it poses considerable challenges for image segmentation. In this paper, we propose an efficient variational method for segmenting images with intensity inhomogeneity. The method is inspired by previous works on two-stage segmentation and variational Retinex. Our method consists of two stages. In the first stage, we decouple the image into reflection and illumination parts by solving a convex energy minimization model with either total variation or tight-frame regularisation. In the second stage, we segment the original image by thresholding on the reflection part, and the inhomogeneous intensity is estimated by the smoothly varying illumination part. We adopt a primal dual algorithm to solve the convex model in the first stage, and the convergence is guaranteed. Numerical experiments clearly show that our method is robust and efficient to segment both natural and medical images.

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