A spectral multigrid method combined with MLFMM for solving electromagnetic wave scattering problems

A new spectral multigrid method (SMG) combined with the multilevel fast multipole method (MLFMM) is proposed for solving electromagnetic wave scattering problems. The MLFMM is used to speed up the matrix-vector product operations and the SMG is employed to accelerate the convergence rate of the Krylov iteration. Unlike traditional algebraic multigrid methods (AMG), the spectral multigrid method is an algebraic two-grid cycle built on a preconditioned Krylov iterative method that is used as the smoother, and the grid transfer operators are defined using the spectral information of the preconditioned matrix. Numerical experiments indicate that this class of multigrid method is very effective with the MLFMM and can reduce both the iteration number and the overall simulation time significantly.