The performance of most widespread surface integral equation (SIE) formulations with the method of moments (MoM) are studied in the context of plasmonic materials. Although not yet widespread in optics, SIE-MoM approaches bring important advantages for the rigorous analysis of penetrable plasmonic bodies. Criteria such as accuracy in near and far field calculations, iterative convergence and reliability are addressed to assess the suitability of these formulations in the field of plasmonics.

We present a surface integral equation (SIE) to model the electromagnetic behavior of metallic objects at optical frequencies. The electric and magnetic current combined field integral equation considering both tangential and normal equations is applied. The SIE is solved by using a method-of-moments (MoM) formulation. The SIE-MoM approach is applied only on the material boundary surfaces and interfaces, avoiding the cumbersome volumetric discretization of the objects and the surrounding space required in differential-equation formulations. Some canonical examples have been analyzed, and the results have been compared with analytical reference solutions in order to prove the accuracy of the proposed method. Finally, two plasmonic Yagi-Uda nanoantennas have been analyzed, illustrating the applicability of the method to the solution of real plasmonic problems.

A surface integral equation (SIE) formulation is applied to the analysis of electromagnetic problems involving three-dimensional (3D) piecewise homogenized left-handed metamaterials (LHM). The resulting integral equations are discretized by the well-known method of moments (MoM) and solved via an iterative process. The unknowns are defined only on the interfaces between different media, avoiding the discretization of volumes and surrounding space, which entails a drastic reduction in the number of unknowns arising in the numerical discretization of the equations. Besides, the SIE-MoM formulation inherently includes the radiation condition at infinity, so it is not necessary to artificially include termination absorbing boundary conditions. Some 3D numerical examples are presented to confirm the validity and versatility of this approach on dealing with LHM, also providing some intuitive verifications of the singular properties of these amazing materials.

A surface integral equation together with the multilevel fast multipole algorithm is successfully applied to fast and accurate resolution of plasmonic problems involving a large number of unknowns. The absorption, scattering, and extinction efficiencies of several plasmonic gold spheres of increasing size are efficiently obtained solving the electric and magnetic current combined-field integral equation. The numerical predictions are compared with reference analytic results to demonstrate the accuracy, suitability, and capabilities of this approach when dealing with large-scale plasmonic problems.

Abstract-It is a proven fact that The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) extension of the conventional Fast Multipole Method (FMM) reduces the matrix vector product (MVP) complexity and preserves the propensity for parallel scaling of the single level FMM. In this paper, an efficient parallel strategy of a nested variation of the FMM-FFT algorithm that reduces the memory requirements is presented. The solution provided by this parallel implementation for a challenging problem with more than 0.5 billion unknowns has constituted the world record in computational electromagnetics (CEM) at the beginning of 2009.