Scattering of Herglotz waves from periodic structures and mapping properties of the Bloch transform

Abstract

When an incident Herglotz wave function scatters from a periodic Lipschitz continuous surface with a Dirichlet boundary condition, the classical (quasi-)periodic solution theory for scattering from periodic structures does not apply, since the incident field lacks periodicity. Relying on the Bloch transform, we provide a solution theory in H¹ for this scattering problem. First, we prove conditions guaranteeing that incident Herglotz wave functions propagating towards the periodic structure have traces in H^1/2 on the periodic surface. Second, we show that the solution to the scattering problem can be decomposed by the Bloch transform into periodic components that solve a periodic scattering problem. Third, these periodic solutions yield an equivalent characterization of the solution to the original non-periodic scattering problem, which allows, for instance, new characterizations of the Rayleigh coefficients of each of the periodic components to be shown. A corollary of our results is that under the conditions mentioned above the operator that maps densities to the restriction of their Herglotz wave function on the periodic surface is always injective; this result generally fails for bounded surfaces.