Formulation of reduced surface integral equations for the electromagnetic wave scattering from three-dimensional layered dielectric bodies

A reduction procedure is developed for an arbitrarily shaped layered dielectric body using for each interface a single unknown function to which the classical surface electric and magnetic currents are related by some surface operators. These operators and single functions are determined recursively from one interface to the next. This allows us to derive the field everywhere from the solution of a surface integral equation in only one vector function relative to only the interface between the layered body and the source region. Since the reduction operators are independent of the structure of the outside region and of the given field source, and also invariant under translation and rotation, the analysis of the three‐dimensional electromagnetic wave scattering and propagation for systems of multilayered or/and multiply nested dielectric bodies based on reduced single integral equations is substantially more efficient than that based on existing coupled integral equation formulations using electric and magnetic currents on all the interfaces, especially for configurations with identical such bodies arbitrarily located and oriented with respect to each other.