Preconditioning techniques for the iterative solution of scattering problems

We consider a time-harmonic electromagnetic scattering problem for an inhomogeneous medium. Some symmetry hypotheses on the refractive index of the medium and on the electromagnetic fields allow to reduce this problem to a two-dimensional scattering problem. This boundary value problem is defined on an unbounded domain, so its numerical solution cannot be obtained by a straightforward application of usual methods, such as for example finite difference methods, and finite element methods. A possible way to overcome this difficulty is given by an equivalent integral formulation of this problem, where the scattered field can be computed from the solution of a Fredholm integral equation of second kind. The numerical approximation of this problem usually produces large dense linear systems. We consider usual iterative methods for the solution of such linear systems, and we study some preconditioning techniques to improve the efficiency of these methods. We show some numerical results obtained with two well known Krylov subspace methods, i.e., Bi-CGSTAB and GMRES.