Lattice Boltzmann Method for Electromagnetic Wave Propagation

Abstract

We present a new Lattice Boltzmann (LB) formulation to solve the Maxwell equations for electromagnetic (EM) waves propagating in a heterogeneous medium. By using a pseudo-vector discrete Boltzmann distribution, the scheme is shown to reproduce the continuum Maxwell equations. The technique compares well with a pseudo-spectral method at solving for two-dimensional wave propagation in a heterogeneous medium, which by design contains substantial contrasts in the refractive index. The extension to three dimensions follows naturally and, owing to the recognized efficiency of LB schemes for parallel computation in irregular geometries, it gives a powerful method to numerically simulate a wide range of problems involving EM wave propagation in complex media.

6 pages, 3 figures, accepted Europhysics letters

References in corpus (3)

• Hiding Under the Carpet: a New Strategy for Cloaking
• Lattice Boltzmann scheme for relativistic fluids
• The Scattering of Electromagnetic Waves from Two-Dimensional Randomly Rough Penetrable Surfaces

Cited by in corpus (3)

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• Numerical analysis of the lattice Boltzmann method for simulation of linear acoustic waves
• Lattice Boltzmann Method for wave propagation in elastic solids with a regular lattice: Theoretical analysis and validation