Accurate finite-difference time-domain simulation of anisotropic media by subpixel smoothing

Finite-difference time-domain methods suffer from reduced accuracy when discretizing discontinuous materials. We previously showed that accuracy can be significantly improved by using subpixel smoothing of the isotropic dielectric function, but only if the smoothing scheme is properly designed. Using recent developments in perturbation theory that were applied to spectral methods, we extend this idea to anisotropic media and demonstrate that the generalized smoothing consistently reduces the errors and even attains second-order convergence with resolution.