Efficient Plane Wave Excitation for 3-D Laguerre-Based FDTD Method

In the three-dimensional (3-D) Laguerre-based finite-difference time-domain method, each electric field variable has the relationship with the adjacent twelve electric fields. This results in the tedious modification of field components adjacent to the total-field/scatter-field boundary in analyzing scattering problems. In addition, the plane wave excitation requires much time in evaluating the expansion coefficient of incident field which involves integral of the weighted Laguerre polynomials with respect to time. In this letter, the plane wave is introduced by defining a set of equivalent currents on a closed Huygen's surface and a computationally efficient one-dimensional auxiliary propagator is presented to speed up the plane wave excitation. Numerical results indicated that the proposed method is valid.