Application of a Taylor series approximation to the Debye–Wolf integral in time-domain numerical electromagnetic simulations

Abstract

Finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) and pseudospectral time-domain (PSTD) methods are numerical electromagnetic simulation techniques that have been employed to perform rigorous simulations of broadband illuminations in several contexts. However, the computational cost of calculating the incident source fields introduced into the FDTD/PSTD grid can be considerable. In some cases, this can exceed the computational cost of what might be considered the principal part of the FDTD/PSTD algorithm, which calculates the spatial derivative of fields throughout the computational grid. In this paper, we analyze an existing method that has been used to approximate broadband illumination, which uses knowledge of the field only at a central frequency of the spectrum. We then present a new, to the best of our knowledge, approximation of the broadband illumination, which is more accurate, while remaining computationally tractable. Finally, we present some examples to verify the accuracy and efficiency of the new method and compare these results with the existing method.