A new well-conditioned Integral formulation for Maxwell equations in three dimensions

We present a new boundary integral equation dedicated to the solution of the boundary problem of a perfectly electrically conducting surface for the harmonic Maxwell equations in unbounded domains. Any solution of the harmonic Maxwell equations is represented as the electromagnetic field generated by a combination of electric and magnetic potentials. These potentials are those appearing in the classical combined field integral equation (CFIE), but their coupling is realized by an operator Y˜⁺ instead of a coefficient. Therefore, the integral equation obtained can be viewed as a generalization of the CFIE. In this paper, we propose an explicit construction of the coupling operator Y˜⁺ which is designed to approximate the exterior admittance operator of the scattering obstacle. A local approximation by the admittance operator of the tangential plane seems to be relevant thanks to the localization effects related to high-frequency phenomena. The provided numerical simulations show that this formulation leads to linear systems that are better conditioned compared to more classical integral equations, which speeds up the resolution when solved with iterative techniques.