Debye sources and the numerical solution of the time harmonic Maxwell equations

Abstract In this paper, we develop a new representation for outgoing solutions to the time‐harmonic Maxwell equations in unbounded domains in ℝ 3 . This representation leads to a Fredholm integral equation of the second kind for solving the problem of scattering from a perfect conductor, which does not suffer from spurious resonances or low‐frequency breakdown, although it requires the inversion of the scalar surface Laplacian on the domain boundary. In the course of our analysis, we give a new proof of the existence of nontrivial families of time‐harmonic solutions with vanishing normal components that arise when the boundary of the domain is not simply connected. We refer to these as k ‐Neumann fields, since they generalize, to nonzero wave numbers, the classical harmonic Neumann fields. The existence of k ‐Neumann fields was established earlier by Kress. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.