Imagine the generalized eigenproblem (6.25) represented in the
full linear space of Helmholtz solutions normalizable in (as described in
Section 6.1.3).
This eigenproblem finds the Helmholtz solutions with extremal
under the condition that the tension `norm'
is held constant.
The eigenvalue is then
.
One set of eigensolutions with large
will be the scaling eigenfunctions
with
,
as demonstrated in Section 6.1.4.
However, highly-evanescent surface waves (Section 6.1.3)
form another set of eigensolutions, which we call `spurious solutions'
(they are not relevant to the Dirichlet billiard problem).
We cannot find the exact form of these surface waves, but it is easy to show
that they exist and to estimate their
, which I now do6.4.
Take an EPW in this function space, with oscillatory wavenumber and
evanescent decay constant
. We have
.
If this function is to have a norm of
in
then it must be oscillating along the boundary,
and decaying along the inward normal.
(If this were not true, it would have an exponentially-large norm in
.
We ignore the complications that may arise in non-convex shapes).
It is therefore a surface wave.
The contribution to
at a given point on
is
,
where
is the wavefunction value at that point.
The contribution to
is just
.
Using
with
for the EPW, gives
for this wave.
Therefore arbitrarily-high
solutions exist with arbitrarily short
decay lengths
.
We do not know the exact distribution of
on the boundary that
forms a solution
which is extremal, but it is plausible that they exist.
The corresponding wavenumber shift is
. For
we can substitute
.
The absence of spurious eigenvalues in a range
about
zero is clear in
the bottom plot of Fig. 6.4.
However, spurious solutions (horizontal lines) do exist for
in this example.
Why do the spurious solutions not persist all the way to
as
the above argument would indicate?
The answer is that the basis set (in this case RPWs)
cannot represent arbitrarily-high
EPWs
(the required coefficients diverge exponentially
[26,63]
so the function rapidly falls into the numerical null-space of
and is truncated away).
Therefore a limitation on the maximum
representable by the
basis (using coefficients
) is what allows
a finite window of true scaling eigenfunctions
to exist either side of
.
If
with
this corresponds to
.
The `usable' states returned from the diagonalization
fall within a window of about
for the quarter stadium.
To keep spurious solutions below this window would therefore suggest limiting
. This is in fact very close to the maximum reliable
EPW basis state oscillatory wavenumber which I have found to be
about
, independent of
.
To conclude, spurious solutions are not a limitation in the
basis set.
Quite the opposite: they are present in the full normalizable Helmholtz
function space, but need to be excluded by an appropriate limitation
on the representable by the basis set.
Even when they do arise,
these spurious solutions are easy to detect and ignore, because their
`automatic' normalisation (Section 6.2.2)
is much less than one and their tension errors are very large.