A scattered field FDTD formulation for dispersive media

In the scattered field formulation of the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method, the electric and magnetic fields are decomposed into incident and scattered components. This approach is often used in scattering problems in which a wave of known shape is incident on a region of interest. The scattered field approach presented for analyzing propagation through dispersive media can be used with any incident field waveform. The use of a look-up table to hold the convolution data yields a method that is faster and less complex than those based on the use of analytical functions. Finally, the additional computer memory and time requirements are insignificant.