THEORY OF SCALAR WAVE-PROPAGATION IN PERIODIC COMPOSITES - A K-CENTER-DOT-P APPROACH

A simple, yet accurate, band structure formalism is presented to descr ibe dispersion relations of scalar waves in periodic composite structu res. We develop a scalar wave version of k.p theory, a technique which has been successfully used for calculating electronic band structures in semiconductors. The formalism permits easy description of the band structure around some interesting points in k-space without intensive computation. The accuracy of the method is demonstrated by considerin g numerical examples for the case of a square array of dielectric cyli nders embedded in a host medium.