Spectra of open waveguides in periodic media

We study the essential spectra of formally self-adjoint elliptic systems on doubly periodic planar domains perturbed by a semi-infinite periodic row of foreign inclusions. We show that the essential spectrum of the problem consists of the essential spectrum of the purely periodic problem and another component, which is the union of the discrete spectra of model problems in the infinite perturbation strip; these model problems arise by an application of the partial Floquet–Bloch–Gelfand transform.