24 Oct 2007; Mat-Nat Faculty (UiTø), room A228. Wednesday 10:15-12:00

Per Jakobsen

"A boundary integral formulation for the 3D Maxwell equations".

Calculation of light scattering on wavelength sized dielectric and metallic objects has a long history, one could say it started with the derivation of the Mie solution in 1908. This is an exact solution of the Maxwell equations that describe scattering of plane waves by spherical metallic particles.

In recent years these kinds of computational problems has taken on additional urgency as optical engineering has moved into the nanometer scale. In addition to light scattering, the computation of actual optical forces has become important. The computational problem to be solved has many challenging features, like an infinite domain, three dimensions, vector quantities and approximately discontinous changes in the optical properties. All these features are naturally taken into account if the Maxwell equations is recast into coupled integral equations formulated on the boundaries of the scattering objects.

The resulting equations are highly singular and must be regularized. In this seminar I will present one such regularized system, the so called Muller scattering equations. I will also discuss possible generalizations and say a few words about the numerical solutions of the equations in a paralell computational environment.