Colloquium | Dr. David Kopriva, Accurate Computation of Wave Scattering in Discontinuous Media with a Discontinuous Galerkin Spectral Element Method

Interesting phenomena arise when waves scatter at material interfaces. Electromagnetic waves, for instance, can be fully reflected, fully transmitted or even jump gaps depending on incident angles and the relative dielectric properties between the materials. Scattering off moving interfaces challenges one's intuition. Crucial to the accurate computation of these phenomena is the ability to approximate hyperbolic PDEs where the coefficients have jump discontinuities and to propagate the waves accurately through the continuous portions of the domain. We will show how to compute material interface problems with spectral accuracy using a discontinuous Galerkin spectral element method, which naturally handles jump discontinuities in material properties and solutions.