This article focuses on the discrete double-curl operator arising in the Maxwell equation that models three dimensional photonic crystals with face centered cubic lattice. The discrete double-curl operator is the degenerate coefficient matrix of the generalized eigenvalue problems (GEVP) due to the Maxwell equation. We derive an eigendecomposition of the degenerate coefficient matrix and explore an explicit form of orthogonal basis for the range and null spaces of this matrix. To solve the GEVP, we apply these theoretical results to project the GEVP to a standard eigenvalue problem (SEVP), which involves only the eigenspace associated with the nonzero eigenvalues of the GEVP and therefore the zero eigenvalues are excluded and will not degrade the computational efficiency. This projected SEVP can be solved efficiently by the inverse Lanczos method. The linear systems within the inverse Lanczos method are well-conditioned and can be solved efficiently by the conjugate gradient method without using a preconditioner. We also demonstrate how two forms of matrix-vector multiplications, which are the most costly part of the inverse Lanczos method, can be computed by fast Fourier transformation due to the eigendecomposition to significantly reduce the computation cost. Integrating all of these findings and techniques, we obtain a fast eigenvalue solver. The solver has been implemented by MATLAB and successfully solves each of a set of $5.184$ million dimension eigenvalue problems within $50$ to $104$ minutes on a workstation with two Intel Quad-C ore Xeon X5687 3.6 GHz CPUs.

In this paper we develop a leap-frog-type finite element method for modeling the electromagnetic wave propagation in metamaterials. The metamaterial model equations are represented by integrodifferential Maxwell’s equations, which are quite challenging to analyze and solve in that we have to solve a coupled problem with different partial differential equations given in different material regions. Our method is based on a mixed finite element method using edge elements, which can easily handle the tangential continuity of the electric field. Stability analysis and optimal error estimate are carried out for the proposed scheme. The scheme is implemented and confirmed to obey the proved optimal convergence rate by using a smooth analytical solution. Then the scheme is extended to model wave propagation in heterogeneous media composed of metamaterials and free space, and extensive numerical results (using a rectangular edge element, a triangular edge element, and mixed edge elements) demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm for modeling the exotic backward wave propagation phenomenon in metamaterials. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper with an exhaustive simulation of backward wave propagation in metamaterials using time-domain finite element methods.

In this article, we present a second-order in time implicit-explicit (IMEX) local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method for computing the Cahn-Hilliard equation, which describes the phase separation phenomenon. It is well-known that the Cahn-Hilliard equation has a nonlinear stability property, i.e., the free-energy functional decreases with respect to time. The discretized Cahn-Hilliard system modeled by the IMEX LDG method can inherit the nonlinear stability of the continuous model. We apply a stabilization technique and prove unconditional energy stability of our scheme. Numerical experiments are performed to validate the analysis. Computational efficiency can be significantly enhanced by using this IMEX LDG method with a large time step.

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The total variation (TV) model is attractive in that it is able to preserve sharp attributes in images. However, the restored images from TV-based methods do not usually stay in a given dynamic range, and hence projection is required to bring them back into the dynamic range for visual presentation or for storage in digital media. This will affect the accuracy of the restoration as the projected image will no longer be the minimizer of the given TV model. In this paper, we show that one can get much more accurate solutions by imposing box constraints on the TV models and solving the resulting constrained models. Our numerical results show that for some images where there are many pixels with values lying on the boundary of the dynamic range, the gain can be as great as 10.28 decibel in the peak signal-to-noise ratio. One traditional hindrance using the constrained model is that it is difficult to solve. However, in this paper, we propose using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to solve the constrained models. This leads to a fast and convergent algorithm that is applicable for both Gaussian and impulse noise. Numerical results show that our ADMM algorithm is better than some state-of-the-art algorithms for unconstrained models in terms of both accuracy and robustness with respect to the regularization parameter.