Fast and accurate analysis of large-scale composite structures with the parallel multilevel fast multipole algorithm

Accurate electromagnetic modeling of complicated optical structures poses several challenges. Optical metamaterial and plasmonic structures are composed of multiple coexisting dielectric and/or conducting parts. Such composite structures may possess diverse values of conductivities and dielectric constants, including negative permittivity and permeability. Further challenges are the large sizes of the structures with respect to wavelength and the complexities of the geometries. In order to overcome these challenges and to achieve rigorous and efficient electromagnetic modeling of three-dimensional optical composite structures, we have developed a parallel implementation of the multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA). Precise formulation of composite structures is achieved with the so-called "electric and magnetic current combined-field integral equation." Surface integral equations are carefully discretized with piecewise linear basis functions, and the ensuing dense matrix equations are solved iteratively with parallel MLFMA. The hierarchical strategy is used for the efficient parallelization of MLFMA on distributed-memory architectures. In this paper, fast and accurate solutions of large-scale canonical and complicated real-life problems, such as optical metamaterials, discretized with tens of millions of unknowns are presented in order to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed electromagnetic solver. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America