Strongly elliptic boundary integral equations for electromagnetic transmission problems

Abstract

SynopsisWe study a boundary integral equation method for transmission problems for strongly elliptic differential operators, which yields a strongly elliptic system of pseudodifferential operators and which therefore can be used for numerical computations with Galerkin's procedure. The method is shown to work for the vector Helmholtz equation in ℝ3 with electromagnetic transmission conditions. We propose a slightly modified system of boundary values in order for the corresponding bilinear form to be coercive over H1. We analyse the boundary integral equations using the calculus of pseudodifferential operators. Here the concept of the principal symbol is used to derive existence and regularity results for the solution.