Summary The paper investigates the Gibbs’ phenomenon at a jump discontinuity for Fourier–Bessel series expansions. The unexpected thing is that the Gibbs’ constant for Fourier–Bessel series appears to be the same as that for Fourier series expansions. In order to compute the coefficients for Fourier–Bessel functionsefficiently, several integral formulasare derived and the Struve functions and their asymptotic expansions discussed, all of which significantly ease the computations. Three numerical examples are investigated. Findings suggest further investigations suitable for undergraduate research projects or small student group investigations.

In the thesis, we propose a newly-developed method called the method of Connected Local Fields (CLF) to analyze opto-electromagnetic passive devices. The method of CLF somewhat resembles a hybrid between the finite difference and pseudo-spectral methods. For opto-electromagnetic passive devices, our primary concern is their steady state behavior, or narrow-band characteristics, so we use a frequency-domain method, in which the system is governed by the Helmholtz equation. The essence of CLF is to use the intrinsic general solution of the Helmholtz equation to expand the local fields on the compact stencil. The original equation can then be transformed into the discretized form called LFE-9 (in 2-D case), and the intrinsic reconstruction formulae describing each overlapping local region can be obtained. Further, we present rigorous analysis of the numerical dispersion equation of LFE-9, by means of first-order approximation, and acquire the closed-form formula of the relative numerical dispersion error. We are thereby able to grasp the tangible influences brought both by the sampling density as well as the propagation direction of plane wave on dispersion error. In our dispersion analysis, we find that the LFE-9 formulation achieves the sixth-order accuracy: the theoretical highest order for discretizing elliptic partial differential equations on a compact nine-point stencil. Additionally, the relative dispersion error of LFE-9 is less than 1%, given that sampling density greater than 2.1 points per wavelength. At this point, the sampling density is nearing that of the Nyquist-Shannon sampling limit, and therefore computational efforts can be significantly reduced.