Some spectral results for photonic crystal waveguides

We study a spectral problem which is related to the propagation of electromagnetic waves in photonic crystal waveguides. The waveguide is created by introducing a linear defect into a periodic medium. The defect is infinitely extended and aligned with one of the coordinate axes. Under certain geometrical assumptions, the underlying Maxwell operator reduces to an elliptic operator and we study the effect of the perturbation by the waveguide on its spectrum. We show that the perturbation introduces guided mode spectrum inside the band gaps of the fully periodic, unperturbed spectral problem and use variational arguments to prove that guided mode spectrum can be created by arbitrarily small perturbations.