Efficient solution of Maxwell’s equations for geometries with repeating patterns by an exchange of discretization directions in the aperiodic Fourier modal method

The aperiodic Fourier modal method in contrast-field formulation is a numerical discretization and solution technique for solving scattering problems in electromagnetics. Typically, spectral discretization is used in the finite periodic direction and spatial discretization in the orthogonal direction. In the light of the fact that the structures of interest often have a large width-to-height ratio and that the two discretization approaches have different computational complexities, we propose exchanging the directions for spatial and spectral discretization. Moreover, if the scatterer has repeating patterns, swapping the discretization directions facilitates the reuse of previous computations. Therefore, the new method is suited for scattering from objects with a finite number of periods, such as gratings, memory arrays, metamaterials, etc. Numerical experiments demonstrate a considerable reduction of the computational costs in terms of time and memory. For a specific test case considered in this paper, the new method (based on alternative discretization) is 40 times faster and requires 100 times less memory than the method based on classical discretization. Keywords: Aperiodic Fourier modal method; AFMM-CFF; Rigorous coupled-wave analysis; RCWA; Electromagnetic scattering; Perfectly matched layer; PML; Computational complexity; Alternative discretizatio