Second-kind integral solvers for TE and TM problems of diffraction by open arcs

We present a novel approach for the numerical solution of problems of diffraction by open arcs in two dimensional space. Our methodology relies on composition of weighted versions of the classical integral operators associated with the Dirichlet and Neumann problems (TE and TM polarizations, respectively) together with a generalization to the open-arc case of the well known closed-surface Calderón formulae. When used in conjunction with spectrally accurate discretization rules and Krylov-subspace linear algebra solvers such as GMRES, the new second-kind TE and TM formulations for open arcs produce results of high accuracy in small numbers of iterations–for low and high frequencies alike.