Consider a time-harmonic electromagnetic plane wave incident on a biperiodic structure in $\boldsymbol{R}^3$. The periodic structure separates two homogeneous regions. The medium inside the structure is chiral and nonhomogeneous. In this paper, variational formulations coupling finite element methods in the chiral medium with a method of integral equations on the periodic interfaces are studied. The well-posedness of the continuous and discretized problems is established. Uniform convergence for the coupling variational approximations of the model problem is obtained.

In this paper we show the well-posedness and stability of the Maxwell scattering problem with the transparent boundary condition. The proof depends on the well-posedness of the time-harmonic Maxwell scattering problem with complex wave numbers which is also established.

This paper is concerned with an ill-posed problem which results from the area of molecular imaging and is known as BLT problem. Using Tikhonov regularization technique, a quadratic optimization problem can be formulated. We provide an improved error estimate for the finite element approximation of the regularized optimization problem. Some numerical examples are presented to demonstrate our theoretical results.

In this paper, both the standard finite element discretization and a two-scale finite element discretization for Schrödinger equations are studied. The numerical analysis is based on the regularity that is also obtained in this paper for the Schrödinger equations. Very satisfying applications to electronic structure computations are provided, too.

Over the last couple of years molecular imaging has been rapidly developed to study physiological and pathological processes in vivo at the cellular and molecular levels. Among molecular imaging modalities, optical imaging stands out for its unique advantages, especially performance and cost-effectiveness. Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) is an emerging optical imaging mode with promising biomedical advantages. In this survey paper, we explain the biomedical significance of BLT, summarize theoretical results on the analysis and numerical solution of a diffusion based BLT model, and comment on a few extensions for the study of BLT.

High order fast sweeping methods have been developed recently in the literature to solve static Hamilton-Jacobi equations efficiently. Comparing with the first order fast sweeping methods, the high order fast sweeping methods are more accurate, but they often require additional numerical boundary treatment for several grid points near the boundary because of the wider numerical stencil. It is particularly important to treat the points near the inflow boundary accurately, as the information would flow into the computational domain and would affect global accuracy. In the literature, the numerical solution at these boundary points are either fixed with the exact solution, which is not always feasible, or computed with a first order discretization, which could reduce the global accuracy. In this paper, we discuss two strategies to handle the inflow boundary conditions. One is based on the numerical solutions of a first order fast sweeping method with several different mesh sizes near the boundary and a Richardson extrapolation, the other is based on a Lax-Wendroff type procedure to repeatedly utilizing the PDE to write the normal spatial derivatives to the inflow boundary in terms of the tangential derivatives, thereby obtaining high order solution values at the grid points near the inflow boundary. We explore these two approaches using the fast sweeping high order WENO scheme in [18] for solving the static Eikonal equation as a representative example. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the performance of these two approaches.

In this paper, we analyze the transmission and reflection properties of a high order discontinuous Galerkin method for dispersive Maxwell's equations, originally proposed by Lu et al. [J. Comput. Phys. 200 (2004), pp. 549-580]. We study the reflection and transmission properties of the numerical method for up to second-order polynomial elements for one- and two-dimensional Maxwell's equations with rectangular meshes. High order accuracy has been shown for reflection and transmission coefficients near material interfaces.

We consider the permeability estimation problem in two-phase porous media flow. We try to identify the permeability field by utilizing both the production data from wells as well as inverted seismic data. The permeability field is assumed to be piecewise constant, or can be approximated well by a piecewise constant function. A variant of the level set method, called Piecewise Constant Level Set Method is used to represent the interfaces between the regions with different permeability levels. The inverse problem is solved by minimizing a functional, and TV norm regularization is used to deal with the ill-posedness. We also use the operator-splitting technique to decompose the constraint term from the fidelity term. This gives us more flexibility to deal with the constraint and helps to stabilize the algorithm.

In this paper, the finite element method and the boundary element method are combined to solve numerically an exterior quasilinear elliptic problem. Based on an appropriate transformation and the Fourier series expansion, the exact quasilinear artificial boundary conditions and a series of the corresponding approximations for the given problem are presented. Then the original problem is reduced into an equivalent problem defined in a bounded computational domain. We provide error estimate for the Galerkin method. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the theoretical results.

Separable nonlinear least squares problems are a special class of nonlinear least squares problems, where the objective functions are linear and nonlinear on different parts of variables. Such problems have broad applications in practice. Most existing algorithms for this kind of problems are derived from the variable projection method proposed by Golub and Pereyra, which utilizes the separability under a separate framework. However, the methods based on variable projection strategy would be invalid if there exist some constraints to the variables, as the real problems always do, even if the constraint is simply the ball constraint. We present a new algorithm which is based on a special approximation to the Hessian by noticing the fact that certain terms of the Hessian can be derived from the gradient. Our method maintains all the advantages of variable projection based methods, and moreover, it can be combined with trust region methods easily and can be applied to general constrained separable nonlinear problems. Convergence analysis of our method is presented and numerical results are also reported.

An explicit multi-conservation finite-difference scheme for solving the spherical shallow-water-wave equation set of barotropic atmosphere has been proposed. The numerical scheme is based on a special semi-discrete form of the equations that conserves four basic physical integrals including the total energy, total mass, total potential vorticity and total enstrophy. Numerical tests show that the new scheme performs closely like but is much more time-saving than the implicit multi-conservation scheme.

We derived and analyzed a new numerical scheme for the Navier-Stokes equations by using $H(div)$ conforming finite elements. A great deal of effort was given to an establishment of some Sobolev-type inequalities for piecewise smooth functions. In particular, the newly derived Sobolev inequalities were employed to provide a mathematical theory for the $H(div)$ finite element scheme. For example, it was proved that the new finite element scheme has solutions which admit a certain boundedness in terms of the input data. A solution uniqueness was also possible when the input data satisfies a certain smallness condition. Optimal-order error estimates for the corresponding finite element solutions were established in various Sobolev norms. The finite element solutions from the new scheme feature a full satisfaction of the continuity equation which is highly demanded in scientific computing.

In this paper, we consider 2D and 3D Darcy-Stokes interface problems. These equations are related to Brinkman model that treats both Darcy's law and Stokes equations in a single form of PDE but with strongly discontinuous viscosity coefficient and zeroth-order term coefficient. We present three different methods to construct uniformly stable finite element approximations. The first two methods are based on the original weak formulations of Darcy-Stokes-Brinkman equations. In the first method we consider the existing Stokes elements. We show that a stable Stokes element is also uniformly stable with respect to the coefficients and the jumps of Darcy-Stokes-Brinkman equations if and only if the discretely divergence-free velocity implies almost everywhere divergence-free one. In the second method we construct uniformly stable elements by modifying some well-known $H(\boldsymbol{Div})$-conforming elements. We give some new 2D and 3D elements in a unified way. In the last method we modify the original weak formulation of Darcy-Stokes-Brinkman equations with a stabilization term. We show that all traditional stable Stokes elements are uniformly stable with respect to the coefficients and their jumps under this new formulation.

The stability of the $P_1$-$P_0$ mixed-element   is established on general Powell-Sabin triangular grids.  The piecewise linear finite element solution approximating   the velocity is divergence-free pointwise   for the Stokes equations.  The finite element solution approximating the pressure in   the Stokes equations can be obtained as a byproduct if   an iterative method is adopted for solving the discrete   linear system of equations.  Numerical tests are presented confirming the theory on the stability and the optimal order of convergence for the $P_1$ Powell-Sabin   divergence-free finite element method.