| Abstract: | Numerical electromagnetic modeling by the finite-difference or finite-element methods leads to a large sparse system of linear algebraic equations. Fast direct methods, requiring an order of at most q log q arithmetic operations to solve a system of q equations, cannot easily be applied to such a system. This paper describes the iterative application of a fast method, namely cyclic reduction, to the numerical solution of the Helmholtz equation with a piecewise constant imaginary coefficient of the absolute term in a plane domain. By means of numerical tests the advantages and limitations of the method compared with classical direct methods are discussed. The iterative application of the cyclic reduction method is very efficient if one can exploit a known solution of a similar (e.g., simpler) problem as the initial approximation. This makes cyclic reduction a powerful tool in solving the inverse problem by trial-and-error. |
