The Fast Multipole Method applied to electromagnetic scattering
Eric Darve
Mechanics and Computation Division
Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305-4040
The solution of integral equations for electromagnetic
scattering leads to large dense matrices. For medium to large size
problems, Gauss elimination is too costly and therefore iterative
techniques are preferred. This leads to the computation of expensive
matrix vector products where the vector is usually formed by the unknown
current on the surface of the scattering object. The Fast Multipole
Method can be used to accelerate these matrix vector products and reduce
the cost from N^2 to N log N where N is the number of unknowns in the
problem. I will review the various multipole formulations and will
present a new formulation adapted to low frequency scattering.