A fast direct solver for the integral equations of scattering theory on planar curves with corners

We describe an approach to the numerical solution of the integral equations of scattering theory on planar curves with corners. It is rather comprehensive in that it applies to a wide variety of boundary value problems; here, we treat the Neumann and Dirichlet problems as well as the boundary value problem arising from acoustic scattering at the interface of two fluids. It achieves high accuracy, is applicable to large-scale problems and, perhaps most importantly, does not require asymptotic estimates for solutions. Instead, the singularities of solutions are resolved numerically. The approach is efficient, however, only in the low- and mid-frequency regimes. Once the scatterer becomes more than several hundred wavelengths in size, the performance of the algorithm of this paper deteriorates significantly. We illustrate our method with several numerical experiments, including the solution of a Neumann problem for the Helmholtz equation given on a domain with nearly 10000 corner points.