A sweeping preconditioner for time-harmonic Maxwell’s equations with finite elements

This paper is concerned with preconditioning the stiffness matrix resulting from finite element discretizations of Maxwell’s equations in the high frequency regime. The moving PML sweeping preconditioner, first introduced for the Helmholtz equation on a Cartesian finite difference grid, is generalized to an unstructured mesh with finite elements. The method dramatically reduces the number of GMRES iterations necessary for convergence, resulting in an almost linear complexity solver. Numerical examples including electromagnetic cloaking simulations are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.