Scattering Analysis of Electromagnetic Materials Using Fast Dipole Method Based on Volume Integral Equation

The fast dipole method (FDM) is extended to analyze the scattering of dielectric and magnetic materials by solving the volume integral equation (VIE). The FDM is based on the equivalent dipole method (EDM) and can achieve the separation of the field dipole and source dipole, which reduces the complexity of interactions between two far groups (such as group i and group j) from O(NiNj) to O(Ni+Nj), where Ni and Nj are the numbers of dipoles in group i and group j, respectively. Targets including left-handed materials (LHMs), which are a kind of dielectric and magnetic materials, are calculated to demonstrate the merits of the FDM. Furthermore, in this study we find that the convergence may become much slower when the targets include LHMs compared with conventional electromagnetic materials. Numerical results about convergence characteristics are presented to show this property.