  A coupled hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) and boundary integral
(BI) method is proposed to efficiently analyze electromagnetic scattering from
inhomogeneous/composite objects. The coupling between the HDG and the BI
equations is realized using the numerical flux operating on the equivalent
current and the global unknown of the HDG. This approach yields sparse coupling
matrices upon discretization. Inclusion of the BI equation ensures that the
only error in enforcing the radiation conditions is the discretization.
However, the discretization of this equation yields a dense matrix, which
prohibits the use of a direct matrix solver on the overall coupled system as
often done with traditional HDG schemes. To overcome this bottleneck, a
"hybrid" method is developed. This method uses an iterative scheme to solve the
overall coupled system but within the matrix-vector multiplication subroutine
of the iterations, the inverse of the HDG matrix is efficiently accounted for
using a sparse direct matrix solver. The same subroutine also uses the
multilevel fast multipole algorithm to accelerate the multiplication of the
guess vector with the dense BI matrix. The numerical results demonstrate the
accuracy, the efficiency, and the applicability of the proposed HDG-BI solver.
