An efficient and energy decaying discontinuous Galerkin method for Maxwell's equations for the Cole-Cole dispersive medium

Abstract: In this work, we investigate the propagation of electromagnetic waves in the Cole-Cole dispersive medium by using the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method to solve the coupled time-domain Maxwell's equations and polarization equation. We define a new and sharpened total energy function for the Cole-Cole model, which better describes the behaviors of the energy than what is available in the current literature. A major theme in the time-domain numerical modeling of this problem has been tackling the difficulty of handling the nonlocal term involved in the time-domain polarization equation. Based on the diffusive representation and the quadrature formula, we derive an approximate system, where the convolution kernel is replaced by a finite number of auxiliary variables that satisfy local-in-time ordinary differential equations. To ensure the resulted approximate system is stable, a nonlinear constrained optimization numerical scheme is established to determine the quadrature coefficients. By a special choice of the numerical fluxes and projections, we obtain {for the constant coefficient case } an optimal-order convergence result for the semi-discrete DG scheme. The temporal discretization is achieved by the standard two-step backward difference formula and a fast algorithm with linear complexity is constructed. Numerical examples are provided for demonstrating the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, validating the theoretical results and illustrating the behaviors of the energy.