Efficient solution of the electric-field integral equation using the iterative LSQR algorithm

In this letter, we consider iterative solutions of the three-dimensional electromagnetic scattering problems formulated by surface integral equations. We show that solutions of the electric-field integral equation (EFIE) can be improved by employing an iterative least-squares QR (LSQR) algorithm. Compared to many other Krylov subspace methods, LSQR provides faster convergence and it becomes an alternative choice to the time-efficient no-restart generalized minimal residual (GMRES) algorithm that requires large amounts of memory. Improvements obtained with the LSQR algorithm become significant for the solution of large-scale problems involving open surfaces that must be formulated using EFIE, which leads to matrix equations that are usually difficult to solve iteratively, even when the matrix-vector multiplications are accelerated via the multilevel fast multipole algorithm.