A spectrally accurate direct solution technique for frequency-domain scattering problems with variable media (Q2264051)

In a fairly consistent paper the authors thoroughly analyze a direct method in order to solve the scattering of time-harmonic waves from a bounded region of the plane where the wavenumber smoothly varies in space. The main idea is to use the impedance-to-impedance (ItI) operators which are inherently stable. They are opposed to Dirichlet-to-Neumann operators which involve inverses of matrices with singular values which could be arbitrarily close to zero. The ItI operators on the smallest (leaf) boxes are accurately approximated by Chebyshev collocation. All in all, the method is high-order accurate, robust and computationally efficient and can be extended to the 3D case. The authors provide some pseudo-code algorithms in order to implement it. Some spectacular numerical experiments are carried out and displayed in impressive pictures.