LOCALLY IMPLICIT DISCONTINUOUS GALERKIN TIME DOMAIN METHOD FOR ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVE PROPAGATION IN DISPERSIVE MEDIA APPLIED TO NUMERICAL DOSIMETRY IN BIOLOGICAL TISSUES.

We are concerned here with the numerical simulation of electromagnetic wave propagation in biological media. Because of their water content, these media are dispersive, i.e., their electromagnetic material characteristics depend on the frequency. In the time domain, this translates to a time dependency of these parameters that can be taken into account through an additional (auxiliary) differential equation for, e.g., the electric polarization, which is coupled to the system of Maxwell's equations. From the application point of view, the problems at hand most often involve irregularly shaped structures corresponding to biological tissues. Modeling realistically the interfaces between tissues is particularly important if one is interested in evaluating accurately the impact of field discontinuities at these interfaces. In this paper, we propose and study a locally implicit discontinuous Galerkin time domain method formulated on an unstructured tetrahedral mesh for solving the resulting system of differential equations in the case of Debye-type media. Three-dimensional numerical simulations are presented concerning the exposure of head tissues to a localized source of radiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]