  Computational tools for characterizing electromagnetic scattering from
objects with uncertain shapes are needed in various applications ranging from
remote sensing at microwave frequencies to Raman spectroscopy at optical
frequencies. Often, such computational tools use the Monte Carlo (MC) method to
sample a parametric space describing geometric uncertainties. For each sample,
which corresponds to a realization of the geometry, a deterministic
electromagnetic solver computes the scattered fields. However, for an accurate
statistical characterization the number of MC samples has to be large. In this
work, to address this challenge, the continuation multilevel Monte Carlo
(CMLMC) method is used together with a surface integral equation solver. The
CMLMC method optimally balances statistical errors due to sampling of the
parametric space, and numerical errors due to the discretization of the
geometry using a hierarchy of discretizations, from coarse to fine. The number
of realizations of finer discretizations can be kept low, with most samples
computed on coarser discretizations to minimize computational cost.
Consequently, the total execution time is significantly reduced, in comparison
to the standard MC scheme.
