Well posedness and finite element approximability of time-harmonic electromagnetic boundary value problems involving bianisotropic materials and metamaterials

A boundary value problem for the time harmonic Maxwell system is investigated through a variational formulation which is shown to be equivalent to it and well-posed if and only if the original problem is. Different bianisotropic materials and metamaterials filling subregions of the problem domain with Lipschitz continuous boundaries are allowed. Well-posedness and finite element approximability of the variational problem are proved by Lax-Milgram and Strang lemmas for a class of material configurations involving bianisotropic materials and metamaterials. Belonging to this class is not necessary, yet, for well-posedness and finite element approximability. Nevertheless, the material configurations of many radiation or scattering problems and many models of microwave components involving bianisotropic materials or metamaterials belong to the above class. Moreover, none of the other available tools commonly used to prove well-posedness seems to be able to cope with the material configurations left out by our treatment.