Fast solution of mixed-potential time-domain integral equations for half-space environments

A fast Fourier transform-accelerated integral-equation based algorithm to efficiently analyze transient scattering from planar perfect electrically conducting objects residing above or inside a potentially lossy dielectric half-space is presented. The algorithm requires O(N/sub t/N/sub s/(logN/sub s/+log/sup 2/N/sub t/)) CPU and O(N/sub t/N/sub s/) memory resources when analyzing electromagnetic wave interactions with uniformly meshed planar structures. Here, N/sub t/ and N/sub s/ are the numbers of simulation time steps and spatial unknowns, respectively. The proposed scheme is therefore far more efficient than classical time-marching solvers, the CPU and memory requirements of which scale as O(N/sub t//sup 2/N/sub s//sup 2/) and O(N/sub t/N/sub s//sup 2/). In the proposed scheme, all pertinent time-domain half-space Green functions are (pre) computed from their frequency-domain counterparts via inverse discrete Fourier transformation. In this process, in-band aliasing is avoided through the application of a smooth and interpolatory window. Numerical results demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.