A staggered discontinuous Galerkin method for wave propagation in media with dielectrics and meta-materials

Some electromagnetic materials exhibit, in a given frequency range, effective dielectric permittivity and/or magnetic permeability which are negative. In the literature, they are called negative index materials, left-handed materials or meta-materials. We propose in this paper a numerical method to solve a wave transmission between a classical dielectric material and a meta-material. The method we investigate can be considered as an alternative method compared to the method presented by the second author and co-workers. In particular, we shall use the abstract framework they developed to prove well-posedness of the exact problem. We recast this problem to fit later discretization by the staggered discontinuous Galerkin method developed by the first author and co-worker, a method which relies on introducing an auxiliary unknown. Convergence of the numerical method is proven, with the help of explicit inf–sup operators, and numerical examples are provided to show the efficiency of the method.