Making simulations with the MNPBEM toolbox big: Hierarchical matrices and iterative solvers

MNPBEM is a Matlab toolbox for the simulation of metallic nanoparticles using a boundary element method (BEM) approach (Hohenester and Trügler, 2012), which is currently used by many research groups in the field of plasmonics. In this paper we introduce an extension for more efficient and faster simulations of large nanoparticles with several thousand to ten thousand boundary elements. Our approach is based on hierarchical matrices, for matrix compression and faster matrix manipulations, as well as iterative solvers for the BEM working equations. We discuss implementation details and present results for a few selected plasmonics applications.