Systematic comparison of the discrete dipole approximation and the finite difference time domain method

Abstract

We compare the discrete dipole approximation (DDA) and the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method for simulating light scattering of spheres in a range of size parameters x up to 80 and refractive indices m up to 2. Using parallel implementations of both methods, we require them to reach a certain accuracy of scattering quantities. We show that relative performance sharply depends on m with boundary value of 1.4. DDA is faster for smaller m, while FDTD – for larger.