Waves in a thin and periodically oscillating medium

We study the asymptotic behavior of the spectrum of an elliptic operator with periodically oscillating coefficients, in a thin domain, with vanishing Dirichlet conditions. Two cases are treated: the case where the periodicity of the oscillations and the thickness of the domain have the same order of magnitude and the case where the oscillations have a frequency much greater than the thickness of the domain. A physical motivation can be to understand the behavior of the probability density associated to the wave function of a particle confined to a very thin domain, with periodically varying characteristics. To cite this article: R. Ferreira, M.L. Mascarenhas, C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris, Ser. I 346 (2008).