Boundary Element Method for Analysis and Design of One-Dimensional Diffractive Optical Elements

The boundary element method (BEM) is a numerical technique to solve the boundary integral for the vector analysis of diffraction.1,2 Boundary integral methods model the interaction between an incident field and a diffractive optical element (DOE) using distributions induced on the surface of the DOE by the incident field. For a conductor the surface distribution is a current and, for a dielectric, it is a polarization field. Re-radiation from the surface distribution, in turn, generates a diffracted field. The objective of the BEM is the determination of the surface distribution given the incident field and DOE.