Eulerian Geometrical Optics and Fast Huygens Sweeping Methods for Three-Dimensional Time-Harmonic High-Frequency Maxwell's Equations in Inhomogeneous Media

Abstract

In some applications, it is reasonable to assume that geodesics (rays) have a consistent orientation so that Maxwell's equations may be viewed as an evolution equation in one of the spatial directions. With such applications in mind, we propose a new Eulerian geometrical-optics method, dubbed the fast Huygens sweeping method, for computing Green's functions of Maxwell's equations in inhomogeneous media in the high-frequency regime and in the presence of caustics. The first novelty of the fast Huygens sweeping method is that a new dyadic-tensor-type geometrical-optics ansatz is proposed for Green's functions which is able to utilize some unique features of Maxwell's equations. The second novelty is that the Huygens--Kirchhoff secondary source principle is used to integrate many locally valid asymptotic solutions to yield a globally valid asymptotic solution so that caustics associated with the usual geometrical-optics ansatz can be treated automatically. The third novelty is that a butterfly algorithm is adapted to carry out the matrix-vector products induced by the Huygens--Kirchhoff integration in $O(N\log N)$ operations, where $N$ is the total number of mesh points, and the proportionality constant depends on the desired accuracy and is independent of the frequency parameter. To reduce the storage of the resulting traveltime and amplitude tables, we compress each table into a linear combination of tensor-product based multivariate Chebyshev polynomials so that the information of each table is encoded into a small number of Chebyshev coefficients. The new method enjoys the following desired features: (1) it precomputes a set of local traveltime and amplitude tables; (2) it automatically takes care of caustics; (3) it constructs Green's functions of Maxwell's equations for arbitrary frequencies and for many point sources; (4) for a specified number of points per wavelength it constructs each Green's function in nearly optimal complexity $O(N\log N)$ in terms of the total number of mesh points $N$, where the prefactor of the complexity depends only on the specified accuracy and is independent of the frequency parameter. Three-dimensional numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the performance and accuracy of the new method.