On the immersed interface method for solving time-domain Maxwell's equations in materials with curved dielectric interfaces

This paper deals with accurate numerical simulation of two-dimensional time-domain Maxwell's equations in materials with curved dielectric interfaces. The proposed fully second-order scheme is a hybridization between the immersed interface method (IIM), introduced to take into account curved geometries in structured schemes, and the Lax–Wendroff scheme, usually used to improve order of approximations in time for partial differential equations. In particular, the IIM proposed for two-dimensional acoustic wave equations with piecewise constant coefficients [C. Zhang, R.J. LeVeque, The immersed interface method for acoustic wave equations with discontinuous coefficients, Wave Motion 25 (1997) 237–263] is extended through a simple least squares procedure to such Maxwell's equations. Numerical results from the simulation of electromagnetic scattering of a plane incident wave by a dielectric circular cylinder appear to indicate that, compared to the original IIM for the acoustic wave equations, the augmented IIM with the proposed least squares fitting greatly improves the long-time stability of the time-domain solution. Semi-discrete finite difference schemes using the IIM for spatial discretization are also discussed and numerically tested in the paper.