An efficient solver for volumetric scattering based on fast spherical harmonics transforms

The Helmholtz equation arises in the study of electromagnetic radiation, optics, acoustics, etc. In spherical coordinates, its general solution can be written as a spherical harmonic series which satisfies the radiation condition at infinity, ensuring that the wave is outgoing. The boundary condition at infinity is hard to enforce with a finite element method since a suitable approximation needs to be made within reasonable distance from scatterers. Luckily, the Helmholtz equation can be represented as a Lippmann-Schwinger integral equation which removes the necessity of the boundary approximations and its Green’s function can be expanded as a spherical harmonic series which leads to our numerical scheme based on spherical harmonic polynomial transform. In this paper, we present an efficient solver for the Helmholtz equation which costs O(N logN) operations, where N is the number of the discretization points. We use the fast spherical harmonic transforms which are originally developed in [33]. The convergence order of the method is tied to the global regularity of the solution. At the lower end, it is second order accurate for discontinuous material properties. The order increases with increasing regularity leading to spectral convergence for globally smooth solutions.