Dissipative Properties of Systems Composed of High-Loss and Lossless Components

Alexander Figotin, Aaron Welters

Published 2012-01-19, updated 2012-08-21Version 3

We study here dissipative properties of systems composed of two components one of which is highly lossy and the other is lossless. A principal result of our studies is that all the eigenmodes of such a system split into two distinct classes characterized as high-loss and low-loss. Interestingly, this splitting is more pronounced the higher the loss of the lossy component. In addition, the real frequencies of the high-loss eigenmodes can become very small and even can vanish entirely, which is the case of overdamping.