Spectral approximation of time-harmonic Maxwell equations in three-dimensional exterior domains

Abstract

We develop in this paper an efficient and robust spectral-Galerkin method for solving the three-dimensional time-harmonic Maxwell equations in exterior domains. We first reduce the problem to a bounded domain by using the capacity operator which characterizes the transparent boundary condition (TBC). Then, we adopt the transformed field expansion (TFE) approach to reduce the problem to a sequence of Maxwell equations in a spherical shell. Finally, we develop an efficient spectral algorithm by using Legendre approximation in the radial direction and vector spherical harmonic expansion in the tangential directions.