Time domain study of the Drude–Born–Fedorov model for a class of heterogeneous chiral materials

We deal with the well‐posedness of the transient Maxwell equations in a particular class of heterogeneous isotropic chiral material modeled by the Drude–Born–Fedorov constitutive relations with different boundary conditions. A new formulation of the underlying evolution problems allows us to establish existence and uniqueness results. The selfadjointness of the curl operator multiplied by a piecewise smooth function in an appropriated Hilbert space is also proved. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.