Abstract

We recently found that the coordinate transformation method (the C method) equipped with well-established recursive algorithms for solving the system of linear equations is numerically instable when it is applied to thinly coated gratings. The origin of this new kind of numerical instability is not the exponential dependence of the field in the coated layers but the ill condition of the eigenvector matrix of the C method when the truncation number is high. Two simple and effective methods to circumvent the new instability are recommended. We also found that the popular recursive matrix algorithms have different (poor) immunities to the new instability, and they all perform inferiorly to the full matrix (nonrecursive) algorithm.

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Numerical stability of the C method and a perturbative preconditioning technique to improve convergence

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