Unconditionally stable Crank-Nicolson scheme for solving two-dimensional Maxwell's equations

Abstract

The Crank-Nicolson method is an unconditionally stable, implicit numerical scheme with second-order accuracy in both time and space. When applied to solve Maxwell's equations in two-dimensions, the resulting matrix is block tri-diagonal, which is very expensive to solve. The Douglas-Gunn algorithm is used to subdivide the update procedure into two sub-steps. At each sub-step only a tri-diagonal matrix needs to be solved for one field component. The other two field components are updated explicitly in one step. The numerical dispersion relations are given for the original Crank-Nicolson scheme and for the Douglas-Gunn modification. The predicted numerical dispersion is shown to agree with numerical experiments, and its numerical anisotropy is shown to be much smaller than that of the ADI-FDTD.