Fast adaptive high-order integral equation methods for electromagnetic scattering from smooth perfect electric conductors

Many integral equation-based methods are available for problems of time-harmonic electromagnetic scattering from perfect electric conductors. Moreover, there are numerous ways in which the geometry can be represented, numerous ways to represent the relevant surface current and/or charge densities, numerous quadrature methods that can be deployed, and numerous fast methods that can be used to accelerate the solution of the large linear systems which arise from discretization. Among the many issues that arise in such scattering calculations are the avoidance of spurious resonances, the applicability of the chosen method to scatterers of non-trivial topology, the robustness of the method when applied to objects with multiscale features, the stability of the method under mesh refinement, the ease of implementation with high-order basis functions, and the behavior of the method as the frequency tends to zero. Since three-dimensional scattering is a challenging, large-scale problem, many of these issues have been historically difficult to investigate. It is only with the advent of fast algorithms and modern iterative methods that a careful study of these issues can be carried out effectively. In this paper, we use GMRES as our iterative solver and the fast multipole method as our acceleration scheme in order to investigate some of these questions. In particular, we compare the behavior of the following integral equation formulations with regard to the issues noted above: the standard electric, magnetic, and combined field integral equations with standard RWG basis functions, the non-resonant charge-current integral equation, the electric charge-current integral equation, the augmented regularized combined source integral equation and the decoupled potential integral equation DPIE. Various numerical results are provided to demonstrate the behavior of each of these schemes.