Time harmonic wave diffraction problems in materials with sign-shifting coefficients

Some electromagnetic materials present, in a given frequency range, an effective dielectric permittivity and/or magnetic permeability which are negative. We are interested in the reunion of such a "negative" material and a classical one. More precisely, we consider here a scalar model problem for the simulation of a wave transmission between two such materials. This model is governed by a Helmholtz equation with a weight function in the principal part which takes positive and negative real values. Introducing additional unknowns, we have already proposed in Bonnet-Ben Dhia et al. (2006) [1] some new variational formulations of this problem, which are of Fredholm type provided the absolute value of the contrast of permittivities is large enough, and therefore suitable for a finite element discretization. We prove here that, under similar conditions on the contrast, the natural variational formulation of the problem, although not "coercive plus compact", is nonetheless suitable for a finite element discretization. This leads to a numerical approach which is straightforward, less costly than the previous ones, and very accurate. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.