Pole-Expansion of the T-Matrix Based on a Matrix-Valued AAA-Algorithm

The transition matrix (T-matrix) is a complete description of an object’s linear scattering response. As such, it has found wide adoption for the theoretical and computational description of multiple-scattering phenomena. In its original form, the T-matrix describes the interaction of a scatterer with a monochromatic source. In practice, however, information about the T-matrix is usually needed in an extended spectral domain. To access the frequency-dispersion, one might naively sample T-matrices over a finely resolved set of discrete frequencies and store one T-matrix per frequency. This approach has multiple drawbacks: it is computationally expensive, requires excessive memory, and it disregards the physical origin of the spectral features, weakening physical interpretability. To overcome these major limitations, we leverage a pole-expansion technique to represent the T-matrix with arbitrary frequency resolution within a selected frequency domain via a set of resonant contributions. A matrix-valued variant of the recently established AAA algorithm for rational approximation enables us to compute a joint pole-expansion of the full T-matrix directly from a small number of sampled T-matrices, using a shared set of poles across all matrix elements. We demonstrate the benefits of such a representation with examples ranging from semianalytically accessible scatterers to quasi-dual bound states in the continuum. To allow the wider community to capitalize on these findings, we provide open-source tools to perform the presented pole-expansion of the T-matrix.