Time-Dependent Debye–Mie Series Solutions for Electromagnetic Scattering

Frequency domain Mie solutions to scattering from spheres have been used for a long time. However, deriving their transient analog is a challenge, as it involves an inverse Fourier transform of the spherical Hankel functions (and their derivatives) that are convolved with inverse Fourier transforms of spherical Bessel functions (and their derivatives). Series expansion of these convolutions is highly oscillatory (therefore, poorly convergent) and unstable. Indeed, the literature on numerical computation of this convolution is very sparse. In this paper, we present a novel quasi-analytical approach to compute transient Mie scattering that is both stable and rapidly convergent. The approach espoused here is to use vector tesseral harmonics as basis function for the currents in time-domain integral equations (TDIEs) together with a novel addition theorem for the Green’s functions that render these expansions stable. This procedure results in an orthogonal, spatially meshfree, and singularity-free system, giving us a set of one-dimensional (1-D) Volterra Integral equations. Time-dependent multipole coefficients for each mode are obtained via a time-marching procedure. Finally, several numerical examples are presented to show the accuracy and stability of the proposed method.