Taking lessons from epidemic contact tracing, this communication proposes a method for boosting the efficiency of a full-wave electromagnetic solver by tracking its simulated energy distribution. When the energy within a subdomain of the problem is near zero, such areas can be safely ignored by the solver, reducing computational load with negligible impact on accuracy. We show that time-domain problems can be adaptively partitioned into energy-active (infections), energy-adjacent (exposed), and energy-null (unexposed) domains. To demonstrate the high efficiency and accuracy of this method, it is successfully applied to several computational electromagnetic problems. Due to its reliance on the causality principle to formulate the energy tracking procedure, this transformative method may be generalized beyond the scope of electromagnetics and optics to include other domains of computational physics.

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Wending Mai, Ronald Jenkins, Yifan Chen, and Douglas H. Werner