Computing Maxwell eigenmodes with Bloch boundary conditions

Abstract: Our goal is to predict the band structure of photonic crystals. This task requires us to compute a number of the smallest non-zero eigenvalues of the time-harmonic Maxwell operator depending on the chosen Bloch boundary conditions. We propose to use a block inverse iteration preconditioned with a suitably modified geometric multigrid method. Since we are only interested in non-zero eigenvalues, we eliminate the large null space by combining a lifting operator and a secondary multigrid method. To obtain suitable initial guesses for the iteration, we employ a generalized extrapolation technique based on the minimization of the Rayleigh quotient that significantly reduces the number of iteration steps and allows us to treat families of very large eigenvalue problems efficiently.