Fast Multipole Method with Complex Coordinates

Abstract

In this work we present a variant of the fast multipole method (FMM) for efficiently evaluating standard layer potentials on geometries with complex coordinates in two and three dimensions. The complex scaled boundary integral method for the efficient solution of scattering problems on unbounded domains results in complex point locations upon discretization. Classical real-coordinate FMMs are no longer applicable, hindering the use of this approach for large-scale problems. Here we develop the complex-coordinate FMM based on the analytic continuation of certain special function identities used in the construction of the classical FMM. To achieve the same linear time complexity as the classical FMM, we construct a hierarchical tree based solely on the real parts of the complex point locations, and derive convergence rates for truncated expansions when the imaginary parts of the locations are a Lipschitz function of the corresponding real parts. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach through several numerical examples and illustrate its application for solving large-scale time-harmonic water wave problems and Helmholtz transmission problems.