Computing electromagnetic fields in inhomogeneous media using lattice gas automata

Lattice Gas Automata (LGA) can be considered as an alternative to the conventional differential equation description of problems in electromagnetics. LGAs are discrete dynamical systems that are based on a microscopic model of the physics being simulated. The basic constituents of an LGA are discrete cells. These cells are interconnected according to certain symmetric requirements to form an extremely large regular lattice. The cells of an LGA are extremely simple, requiring only a few bits to completely describe their states. Even through they are simple however, the collective behaviour of LGA microscopic systems are capable of exhibiting those behaviours described by partial differential equations for real physical systems. One type of simple LGA, the HPP LGA, is constructed with only a few bits per cell and operated on a rectangular lattice. We have demonstrated [1] that it is capable of simulating two dimensional electromagnetic fields. Furthermore, the inherent parallelism and simplicity of LGA algorithms make them ideally suited to implementation in a parallel processing architecture.