An Efficient Method for Computing Highly Oscillatory Physical Optics Integral

Abstract—In this work, we use the numerical steepest descent path (numerical SDP) method in complex analysis theory to calculate the highly oscillatory physical optics (PO) integral with quadratic phase and amplitude variations on the triangular patch. The Stokes’ phenomenon will occur due to various asymptotic behaviors on different domains. The stationary phase point contributions are carefully studied by the numerical SDP method and complex analysis using contour deformation. Its result agrees very well with the leading terms of the traditional asymptotic expansion. Furthermore, the resonance points and vertex points contributions from the PO integral are also extracted. Compared with traditional approximate asymptotic expansion approach, our method has significantly improved the PO integral accuracy by one to two digits (10−1 to 10−2) for evaluating the PO integral. Moreover, the computation effort for the highly oscillatory integral is frequency independent. Numerical results for PO integral on the triangular patch are given to verify the proposed numerical SDP theory.