Selected Asymptotic Methods with Applications to Electromagnetics and Antennas

This book describes and illustrates the application of several asymptotic methods that have proved useful in the authors" research in electromagnetics and antennas. We first define asymptotic approximations and expansions and explain these concepts in detail. We then develop certain prerequisites from complex analysis such as power series, multivalued functions (including the concepts of branch points and branch cuts), and the all-important gamma function. Of particular importance is the idea of analytic continuation (of functions of a single complex variable); our discussions here include some recent, direct applications to antennas and computational electromagnetics. Then, specific methods are discussed. These include integration by parts and the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma, the use of contour integration in conjunction with other methods, techniques related to Laplace"s method and Watson"s lemma, the asymptotic behavior of certain Fourier sine and cosine transforms, and the Poisson...