Novel electromagnetic surface integral equations for highly accurate computations of dielectric bodies with arbitrarily low contrasts

We present a novel stabilization procedure for accurate surface formulations of electromagnetic scattering problems involving three-dimensional dielectric objects with arbitrarily low contrasts. Conventional surface integral equations provide inaccurate results for the scattered fields when the contrast of the object is low, i.e., when the electromagnetic material parameters of the scatterer and the host medium are close to each other. We propose a stabilization procedure involving the extraction of nonradiating currents and rearrangement of the right-hand side of the equations using fictitious incident fields. Then, only the radiating currents are solved to calculate the scattered fields accurately. This technique can easily be applied to the existing implementations of conventional formulations, it requires negligible extra computational cost, and it is also appropriate for the solution of large problems with the multilevel fast multipole algorithm. We show that the stabilization leads to robust formulations that are valid even for the solutions of extremely low-contrast objects. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.