Mathematical analysis on electromagnetic waves in photonic graphene, a photonic topological material which has a honeycomb structure, is one of the most important current research topics. By modulating the honeycomb structure, numerous topological phenomena have been observed recently. The electromagnetic waves in such a media are generally described by the 2-dimensional wave equation. It has been shown that the corresponding elliptic operator with a honeycomb material weight has Dirac points in its dispersion surfaces. In this paper, we study the time evolution of the wave packets spectrally concentrated at such Dirac points in a modulated honeycomb material weight. We prove that such wave packet dynamics is governed by the Dirac equation with a varying mass in a large but finite time. Our analysis provides mathematical insights to those topological phenomena in photonic graphene.

METHODS AND APPLICATIONS OF ANALYSIS. c 2009 International Press Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 507520, December 2009 006

In this paper, we study the asymptotic stability of rarefaction waves for the compressible isentropic NavierStokes equations with density-dependent viscosity. First, a weak solution around a rarefaction wave to the Cauchy problem is constructed by approximating the system and regularizing the initial values which may contain vacuum states. Then some global in time estimates on the weak solution are obtained. Based on these uniform estimates, the vacuum states are shown to vanish in finite time and the weak solution we constructed becomes a unique strong one. Consequently, the stability of the rarefaction wave is proved in a weak sense. The theory holds for large-amplitudes rarefaction waves and arbitrary initial perturbations.

The existence of a discrete travelling wave is proved for the relaxing scheme. The main idea is to change the original scheme such that the resulting scheme is monotonic to which Jennings' result can be applied. The equivalence of the resulting scheme and the original one is shown when = 1 q. The u-component of the discrete travelling wave thus obtained is a discrete shock for a monotone conservative difference scheme, which approximates the corresponding conservation law.

We study the oscillatory behavior that arises in solutions of a dispersive numerical scheme for the Hopf equation whenever the classical solution of the equation develops a singularity. Modulation equations are derived that describe period-two oscillations so long as the solution of those equations takes values for which the equations are hyperbolic. However, those equations have an elliptic region that may be entered by its solutions in a finite time, after which the corresponding period-two oscillations are seen to break down. This kind of phenomenon has not been observed for integrable schemes. The generation and propagation of period-two oscillations are asymptotically analyzed and a matching formula is found for the transition between oscillatory and nonoscillatory regions. Modulation equations are also presented for period-three oscillations. Numerical experiments are carried out that illustrate our analysis.