ABCs: from theory to practice

This report gives a brief historical look at the development of absorbing boundary conditions (ABCs) with the intention of highlighting key contributions. Following this, the performance of ABCs is discussed from a theoretical perspective, then the importance of effective adaptation of the ABC to numerical techniques is considered. Finally, for purposes of discussing the aspects that are critical to effective and uniform numerical evaluation of ABCs, a numerical experiment that can test ABCs for their effectiveness in absorbing evanescent waves as well as travelling waves incident at arbitrary angles is presented.