Convergence of parallel overlapping domain decomposition methods with impedance boundary conditions for time-harmonic Maxwell equations in heterogeneous media

Abstract: This paper analyzes the convergence of parallel overlapping domain-decomposition methods with impedance boundary conditions for the time-harmonic Maxwell equations in heterogeneous media. We prove that the parallel iterative method is well-posed in an appropriate function space, and characterize the error propagation operator through impedance-to-impedance maps that describe interactions between neighboring subdomains. For strip domain decompositions, we derive explicit convergence estimates in terms of the norms of the impedance-to-impedance maps. At the discrete level, we develop the finite-element counterpart of these results based on Nédélec-element discretisations. Under the assumption that the discrete impedance-to-impedance maps approximate their continuous counterparts as the mesh is refined, we show that the discrete method inherits the convergence behavior of the continuous method. We illustrate this theory with numerical experiments for strip domain decompositions, and also present numerical experiments for checkerboard domain decompositions that go beyond our theory.