A sweeping preconditioner for time-harmonic Maxwell's equations with finite elements (Q417921)

The paper introduces preconditioners for finite element discretization matrices of Maxwell's equations in the high frequency regime. The authors generalize the concept of the moving PML sweeping preconditioning, first introduced for Helmholtz equations on Cartesian finite difference grids, to unstructured meshes and linear edge elements. Numerical examples including electromagnetic cloaking simulations indicate that the preconditioner is essentially unaffected by the frequency, requiring only a small number of GMRES iterations which remains almost constant as the wave-number increases. This produces a linear complexity solver in 2D and an almost linear complexity solver in 3D.