Acoustic and electromagnetic equations. Integral representations for harmonic problems (Q5933176)

This book is based on lectures held by the author and is intended for graduate students in mathematics, physics, and engineering. It is self-contained and should be useful to anyone interested in problems of acoustic and electromagnetics. After a short introduction to wave problems in Chapter 1, a detailed analysis of the exterior harmonic Helmholtz equation in weighted Sobolev spaces is presented in Chapter 2. Much effort is devoted to the special case of a spherical object including the introduction of spherical harmonics and spherical Bessel functions. This approach not only provides an insight into the notion of radiation conditions at infinity, but also yields a simple variational formulation and an elegant proof of existence and uniqueness in the case of general exterior domains. In Chapter 3 the first kind integral equations associated with the interior and exterior Dirichlet and Neumann problems are studied. Coercivity results are given in the case of the Laplace equation, allowing to treat the Helmholtz problems via compact perturbation. Chapter 4 deals with singular integral operators in \(\mathbb{R}^n\) and applications to boundary integral equations with homogeneous and pseudo-homogeneous kernels. The last chapter is devoted to exterior problems for the time-harmonic Maxwell equations including perfect conductor and impedance boundary conditions. Special attention is paid to the associated boundary integral equations and their variational formulations. The tools introduced in the book also provide the basis of most numerical approximations to harmonic exterior problems.