General Method for Evaluation of Stop-Bands of Periodic Structures with Symmetric Unit Cells (opens in new tab)

The mirror symmetries of a periodic unit cell are exploited to decompose the standing-wave eigenproblem at the high-symmetry vertices of the Brillouin zone into four independent sub-problems on a quarter-cell, each governed by Neumann (sound-hard) or Dirichlet (sound-soft) boundary conditions. Sorting and pairing the resulting eigenfrequencies by index along each segment of the irreducible Brillouin zone boundary yields an explicit formula for t...