Time harmonic electromagnetic scattering from a bounded obstacle: an existence theorem and a computational method

Let Omega subset of R-3 be a bounded simply connected obstacle with boundary partial derivative Omega locally Lipschitz, we consider the scattering of a time harmonic electromagnetic wave that hits Omega when partial derivative Omega is assumed to be perfectly conducting. The scattered electromagnetic field is the solution of an exterior boundary value problem for the vector Helmholtz equation. Under suitable hypotheses we prove the existence and uniqueness of the solution of this boundary value problem and we give a new numerical method to compute this solution. The numerical method proposed is based on a perturbative series and is highly parallelizable. Some numerical results obtained with the numerical method proposed on test problems are presented and discussed from the numerical and the physical point of view. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics. [S0022-2488(99)03409-X].