We give the formulation of a Riemannian Newton algorithm for solving a class of nonlinear eigenvalue problems by minimizing a total energy function subject to the orthogonality constraint. Under some mild assumptions, we establish the global and quadratic convergence of the proposed method. Moreover, the positive definiteness condition of the Riemannian Hessian of the total energy function at a solution is derived. Some numerical tests are reported to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method for solving large-scale problems.

The standard Yee's scheme for the Maxwell eigenvalue problems places the discrete electric field variable at the midpoints of the edges of the grid cells. It performs well when the permittivity is a scalar field. However, when the permittivity is a Hermitian full tensor filed it would generate un-physical complex eigenvalues or frequencies. In this paper, we propose a finite element method which can be interpreted as a modified Yee's scheme to overcome this difficulty. This interpretation enables us to create a fast FFT eigensolver that can compute very effectively the band structure of the anisotropic photonic crystal with SC and FCC lattices. Furthermore, we overcome the usual large null space associated with the Maxwell eigenvalue problem by deriving a null-space free discrete eigenvalue problem which involves a crucial Hermitian positive definite linear system to be solved in each of the iteration steps. It is demonstrated that the CG method without preconditioning converges in 37 iterations even when the dimension of the matrix is as large as $5,184,000$.

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