  A spectral method is described for solving coupled elliptic problems on an
interior and an exterior domain. The method is formulated and tested on the
two-dimensional interior Poisson and exterior Laplace problems, whose solutions
and their normal derivatives are required to be continuous across the
interface. A complete basis of homogeneous solutions for the interior and
exterior regions, corresponding to all possible Dirichlet boundary values at
the interface, are calculated in a preprocessing step. This basis is used to
construct the influence matrix which serves to transform the coupled boundary
conditions into conditions on the interior problem. Chebyshev approximations
are used to represent both the interior solutions and the boundary values. A
standard Chebyshev spectral method is used to calculate the interior solutions.
The exterior harmonic solutions are calculated as the convolution of the
free-space Green's function with a surface density; this surface density is
itself the solution to an integral equation which has an analytic solution when
the boundary values are given as a Chebyshev expansion. Properties of Chebyshev
approximations insure that the basis of exterior harmonic functions represents
the external near-boundary solutions uniformly. The method is tested by
calculating the electrostatic potential resulting from charge distributions in
a rectangle. The resulting influence matrix is well-conditioned and solutions
converge exponentially as the resolution is increased. The generalization of
this approach to three-dimensional problems is discussed, in particular the
magnetohydrodynamic equations in a finite cylindrical domain surrounded by a
vacuum.
