We study the essential spectrum of operator pencils associated with anisotropic Maxwell equations, with permittivity $varepsilon$, permeability $mu$ and conductivity $sigma$, on finitely connected unbounded domains. The main result is that the essential spectrum of the Maxwell pencil is the union of two sets: namely, the spectrum of the pencil $mathrm{div}((omegavarepsilon + i sigma) abla,cdot,)$, and the essential spectrum of the Maxwell pencil with constant coefficients. We expect the analysis to be of more general interest and to open avenues to investigation of other questions concerning Maxwells and related systems.
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