Computation of Electromagnetic Fields Scattered From Dielectric Objects of Uncertain Shapes Using MLMC

Abstract

Simulators capable of computing scattered fields from objects of uncertain shapes are highly useful in electromagnetics and photonics, where device designs are typically subject to fabrication tolerances. Knowledge of statistical variations in scattered fields is useful in ensuring error-free functioning of devices. Oftentimes such simulators use a Monte Carlo (MC) scheme to sample the random domain, where the variables parameterize the uncertainties in the geometry. At each sample, which corresponds to a realization of the geometry, a deterministic electromagnetic solver is executed to compute the scattered fields. However, to obtain accurate statistics of the scattered fields, the number of MC samples has to be large. This significantly increases the total execution time. In this work, to address this challenge, the Multilevel MC (MLMC [1]) scheme is used together with a (deterministic) surface integral equation solver. The MLMC achieves a higher efficiency by balancing the statistical errors due to sampling of the random domain and the numerical errors due to discretization of the geometry at each of these samples. Error balancing results in a smaller number of samples requiring coarser discretizations. Consequently, total execution time is significantly shortened.