The drum problem-finding the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the Laplacian
with Dirichlet boundary condition-has many applications, yet remains
challenging for general domains when high accuracy or high frequency is needed.
Boundary integral equations are appealing for large-scale problems, yet certain
difficulties have limited their use. We introduce two ideas to remedy this: 1)
We solve the resulting nonlinear eigenvalue problem using Boyd's method for
analytic root-finding applied to the Fredholm determinant. We show that this is
many times faster than the usual iterative minimization of a singular value. 2)
We fix the problem of spurious exterior resonances via a combined field
representation. This also provides the first robust boundary integral
eigenvalue method for non-simply-connected domains. We implement the new method
in two dimensions using spectrally accurate Nystrom product quadrature. We
prove exponential convergence of the determinant at roots for domains with
analytic boundary. We demonstrate 13-digit accuracy, and improved efficiency,
in a variety of domain shapes including ones with strong exterior resonances.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, submitted to SIAM Journal of Numerical Analysis.
Updated a duplicated picture. All results unchange
