Oscillating behaviour of the spectrum for a plasmonic problem in a domain with a rounded corner

We investigate the eigenvalue problem -div(σ ∇ u) = λu (P) in a 2D domain Ω divided into two regions Ω_±. We are interested in situations where σ takes positive values on Ω₊ and negative ones on Ω_-. Such problems appear in time harmonic electromagnetics in the modeling of plasmonic technologies. In a recent work [L. Chesnel, X. Claeys and S.A. Nazarov, Asymp. Anal. 88 (2014) 43-74], we highlighted an unusual instability phenomenon for the source term problem associated with (P): for certain configurations, when the interface between the subdomains Ω_± presents a rounded corner, the solution may depend critically on the value of the rounding parameter. In the present article, we explain this property studying the eigenvalue problem (P). We provide an asymptotic expansion of the eigenvalues and prove error estimates. We establish an oscillatory behaviour of the eigenvalues as the rounding parameter of the corner tends to zero. We end the paper illustrating this phenomenon with numerical experiments.