Diagonal forms of the translation operators in the fast multipole algorithm for scattering, problems

The integral equations of acoustic and electromagnetic scattering generate large dense systems of linear equations. These systems are efficiently solved with iterative methods where the matrix-vector multiplication is computed using a special fast method, such as the fast Fourier transform or the fast multipole method (FMM). In this paper, the so called diagonal forms of the translation operators for the fast multipole method are derived starting from integral representations of certain special functions. Error analysis of the FMM is given, considering both the truncation error of potential expansions and the errors from the use of numerical integration in the diagonal translation theorem. The implications of the error bounds on the FMM algorithm are discussed.