| Maxwell's equations are the partial differential equations describing electromagnetism. They can be used to model electric and magnetic fields in different materials from light in fiber optic cables to radar waves bouncing off a stealth fighter jet. In problems with electromagnetic radiation of a single frequency Maxwell's equations may be reduced to their time-harmonic form. Further simplifying the problem a multilayer boundary variation method for the forward modeling of multilayered diffraction optics is presented. This approach enables fast and high-order accurate modeling of periodic transmission optics consisting of an arbitrary number of materials and interfaces of general shape subject to plane wave illumination or, by solving a sequence of problems, illumination by beams. The key developments of the algorithm are discussed as are details of an efficient implementation. Numerous comparisons with exact solutions and highly accurate direct solutions confirm the accuracy, versatility, and efficiency of the proposed method. The high accuracy of the method is leveraged to solve an application involving the in-coupling process for grating-coupled planar optical waveguide sensors. For more general solutions of the time-harmonic Maxwell's equations an hp-adaptive discontinuous Galerkin finite element method is studied. The discontinuous Galerkin finite element method is a general method for solving partial differential equations that has had success with time evolution problems. The application to time-harmonic problems is a new and developing area of research. As a first step, an overlapping Schwarz method for the discontinuous Galerkin discretization of the indefinite Helmholtz equation is examined. For an hp-adaptive method to be successful an error indicator is required to determine the areas of the computational domain that need increased resolution. The use of adjoint based error indicators is explored through solving the time-harmonic Maxwell's equations for singular problems. To aid in the study of discontinuous Galerkin methods both in the time and frequency domains a C++ code, Sledge++, has been developed. Examples and implementation details of Sledge++ are also discussed. |
