Well-conditioned boundary integral equation formulations for the solution of high-frequency electromagnetic scattering problems

Abstract: We present several versions of Regularized Combined Field Integral Equation (CFIER) formulations for the solution of three dimensional frequency domain electromagnetic scattering problems with Perfectly Electric Conducting (PEC) boundary conditions. Just as in the Combined Field Integral Equations (CFIE), we seek the scattered fields in the form of a combined magnetic and electric dipole layer potentials that involves a composition of the latter type of boundary layers with regularizing operators. The regularizing operators are of two types: (1) modified versions of electric field integral operators with complex wavenumbers, and (2) principal symbols of those operators in the sense of pseudodifferential operators. We show that the boundary integral operators that enter these CFIER formulations are Fredholm of the second kind, and invertible with bounded inverses in the classical trace spaces of electromagnetic scattering problems. We present a spectral analysis of CFIER operators with regularizing operators that have purely imaginary wavenumbers for spherical geometries. Under certain assumptions on the coupling constants and the absolute values of the imaginary wavenumbers of the regularizing operators, we show that the ensuing CFIER operators are coercive for spherical geometries. These properties allow us to derive wavenumber explicit bounds on the condition numbers of certain CFIER operators that have been proposed in the literature. When regularizing operators with complex wavenumbers with non-zero real parts are used, we show numerical evidence that those complex wavenumbers can be selected in a manner that leads to CFIER formulations whose condition numbers can be bounded independently of frequency for spherical geometries.