A passive system is one that cannot produce energy, a property that naturally poses constraints on the system. A system on convolution form is fully described by its transfer function, and the class of Herglotz functions, holomorphic functions mapping the open upper half plane to the closed upper half plane, is closely related to the transfer functions of passive systems. Following a well-known representation theorem, Herglotz functions can be represented by means of positive measures on the real line. This fact is exploited in this paper in order to rigorously prove a set of integral identities for Herglotz functions that relate weighted integrals of the function to its asymptotic expansions at the origin and innity. The integral identities are the core of a general approach introduced here to derive sum rules and physical limitations on various passive physical systems. Although similar approaches have previously been applied to a wide range of specic applications, this paper is the rst to deliver a general procedure together with the necessary proofs. This procedure is described thoroughly, and exemplied with examples from electromagnetic theory.

Fictitious domain methods are attractive for shape optimization applications, since they do not require deformed or regenerated meshes. A recently developed such method is the CutFEM approach, which allows crisp boundary representations and for which uniformly well-conditioned system matrices can be guaranteed. Here, we investigate the use of the CutFEM approach for acoustic shape optimization, using as test problem the design of an acoustic horn for favorable impedance-matching properties. The CutFEM approach is used to solve the Helmholtz equation, and the geometry of the horn is implicitly described by a level-set function. To promote smooth algorithmic updates of the geometry, we propose to use the nodal values of the Laplacian of the level-set function as design variables. This strategy also improves the algorithm's convergence rate, counteracts mesh dependence, and, in combination with Tikhonov regularization, controls small details in the optimized designs. An advantage with the proposed method is that the exact derivatives of the discrete objective function can be expressed as boundary integrals, as opposed to when using a traditional method that uses mesh deformations. The resulting horns possess excellent impedance-matching properties and exhibit surprising subwavelength structures, not previously seen, which are possible to capture due to the fixed mesh approach.

The linearized, compressible Navier-Stokes equations can be used to model acoustic wave propagation in the presence of viscous and thermal boundary layers. However, acoustic boundary layers are notorious for invoking prohibitively high resolution requirements on numerical solutions of the equations. We derive and present a strategy for how viscous and thermal boundary-layer effects can be represented as a boundary condition on the standard Helmholtz equation for the acoustic pressure. This boundary condition constitutes an ( ) perturbation, where is the boundary-layer thickness, of the vanishing Neumann condition for the acoustic pressure associated with a lossless sound-hard wall. The approximate model is valid when the wavelength and the minimum radius of curvature of the wall is much larger than the boundary layer thickness. In the special case of sound propagation in a cylindrical duct, the model collapses to the classical Kirchhoff solution. We assess the model in the case of sound propagation through a compression driver, a kind of transducer that is commonly used to feed horn loudspeakers. Due to the presence of shallow chambers and thin slits in the device, it is crucial to include modeling of visco-thermal losses in the acoustic analysis. The transmitted power spectrum through the device calculated numerically using our model agrees well with computations using a hybrid model, where the full linearized, compressible Navier-Stokes equations are solved in the narrow regions of the device and the inviscid Helmholtz equations elsewhere. However, our model needs about two orders of magnitude less memory and computational time than the more complete model.

Understanding the interaction between electromagnetic waves and matter is vital in applications ranging from classical optics to antenna theory. This paper derives physical limitations on the scattering of electromagnetic vector spherical waves. The assumptions made are that the heterogeneous scatterer is passive, and has constitutive relations which are in convolution form in the time domain and anisotropic in the static limit. The resulting bounds limit the reflection coefficient of the modes over a frequency interval, and can thus be interpreted as limitations on the absorption of power from a single mode. They can be used within a wide range of applications, and are particularly useful for electrically small scatterers. The derivation follows a general approach to derive sum rules and physical limitations on passive systems in convolution form. The time domain versions of the vector spherical waves are used to describe the passivity of the scatterer, and a set of integral identities for Herglotz functions are applied to derive sum rules from which the physical limitations follow.