Symmetric boundary integral formulations for Helmholtz transmission problems

In this work we propose and analyze numerical methods for the approximation of the solution of Helmholtz transmission problems in two or three dimensions. This kind of problems arises in many applications related to scattering of acoustic, thermal and electromagnetic waves. Formulations based on boundary integral methods are powerful tools to deal with transmission problems in unbounded media. Different formulations using boundary integral equations can be found in the literature. We propose here new symmetric formulations based on a paper by Martin Costabel and Ernst P. Stephan (1985), that uses the Calderَn projector for the interior and exterior problems to develop closed expressions for the interior and exterior Dirichlet-to-Neumann operators. These operators are then matched to obtain an integral system that is equivalent to the Helmholtz transmission problem and uses Cauchy data on the transmission boundary as unknowns. We show how to simplify the aspect and analysis of the method by employing an additional mortar unknown with respect to the ones used in the original paper, writing it in an appropriate way to devise Krylov type iterations based on the separate Dirichlet-to-Neumann operators.