Fundamentals of a Null Field Method-Surface Equivalence Principle Approach for Scattering by Dielectric Cylinders

The null-field method (NFM) and the method of auxiliary sources (MAS) have been both used extensively for the numerical solution of boundary-value problems arising in diverse applications involving propagation and scattering of waves. It has been shown that, under certain conditions, the applicabil- ity of MAS may be restricted by issues concerning the divergence of the auxiliary currents, manifested by the appearance of exponentially large os- cillations. In this work, we combine the NFM with the surface equivalence principle (SEP) and investigate analytically the convergence properties of the combined NFM-SEP with reference to the problem of (internal or external) line-source excitation of a dielectric cylinder. Our main purpose is to prove that (contrary to the MAS) the discrete NFM-SEP currents, when prop- erly normalized, always converge to the corresponding continuous current densities, and thus no divergence and oscillations phenomena appear. The theoretical analysis of the NFM-SEP is accompanied by detailed comparisons with the MAS as well as with representative numerical results illustrating the conclusions.