Gaps in the essential spectrum of periodic elastic waveguides

Abstract Examples of periodic elastic waveguides are constructed, the essential spectrum of which has a gap, i.e. an open interval in the positive real semiaxis intersecting with the discrete spectrum only. The gap is detected with the help of an inequality of Korn's type and the max‐min principle for eigenvalues of self‐adjoint positive operators. Under a certain symmetry assumption, it is demonstrated that the first band of the essential spectrum can include eigenvalues in the point spectrum.