Abstract

We consider the scattering of time-harmonic electromagnetic waves from a chiral medium. It is known for the Drude–Born–Fedorov model that the forward scattering problem can be described by an integro-differential equation. In this paper we study a Galerkin finite element approximation for this integro-differential equation. Our Galerkin scheme, which relies on a suitable periodization of the integral equation, enables the use of the fast Fourier transform and a simple numerical implementation. We establish a quasi-optimal convergence analysis for the Galerkin method. Explicit formulas for the discrete scheme are also provided.