Analytical investigation of an integral equation method for electromagnetic scattering by biperiodic structures

This paper is concerned with the study of a new integral equation formulation for electromagnetic scattering by a 2π-biperiodic polyhedral Lipschitz profile. Using a combined potential ansatz, we derive a singular integral equation with Fredholm operator of index zero from time-harmonic Maxwell's equations and prove its equivalence to the electromagnetic scattering problem. Moreover, under certain assumptions on the electric permittivity and the magnetic permeability, we obtain existence and uniqueness results in the special case that the grating is smooth and, under more restrictive assumptions, in the case that the grating is of polyhedral Lipschitz regularity