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Halim Boutayeb

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Halim Boutayeb
ResidenceGatineau, Quebec, Canada
Known forNon-relativistic FDTD analysis of moving bodies; classical electromagnetic accounts of the Doppler effect, stellar aberration, the Sagnac effect and Compton scattering
Scientific career
FieldsElectromagnetism, Physics
InstitutionsUniversité du Québec en Outaouais

Halim Boutayeb is an electrical engineer and full professor of electrical engineering at the Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO) in Gatineau, Canada. He is a specialist in antennas, microwave circuits and computational electromagnetics, and in recent years he has used the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method to re-derive, from purely classical electromagnetic theory and an implicitly absolute time, a series of results normally presented as evidence for Special Relativity or for quantum theory — among them the relativistic Doppler shift, stellar aberration, the Fizeau moving-water experiment, the Sagnac effect, Compton scattering, the Planck radiation law and the photoelectric effect.

Biography

Boutayeb received the Diplôme d'Ingénieur in electrical engineering from the École Supérieure d'Ingénieurs de Rennes, France, and a French D.E.A. (M.Sc.) in electrical engineering from the University of Rennes in 2000, followed by a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Rennes in 2003.

From March 2004 to December 2006 he was at INRS-EMT in Montréal, holding a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Postdoctoral Fellowship. From January 2007 to December 2011 he was a researcher at École Polytechnique de Montréal, where he was a coordinator and member of the Centre de Recherche en Électronique Radiofréquence (CREER). From January 2012 to June 2020 he was a research and development staff member with Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. in Ottawa, Ontario. Since July 2020 he has been a professor of electrical engineering at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, where he works in the Département d'informatique et d'ingénierie and in the Research Group on Advanced RF Technologies (LRTRA).

He has authored or co-authored more than 100 journal and conference papers and holds 24 patents. He received a Best Paper Award at the European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (2004) and five Gold Huawei Medal Awards (2013, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019), and is a senior member of the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec. He has served on the Technical Program Committee of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (2006) and on the Steering Committee of the IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium (2012). His mainstream engineering work covers phased arrays and beam-steering antennas, substrate-integrated waveguide structures, automotive and millimetre-wave radar antennas, rectennas and RF energy harvesting, artificial and ultra-refractive materials, local positioning systems and biomedical applications.

Scientific contributions

Direct FDTD analysis of moving bodies

Boutayeb's central methodological contribution is what he calls a direct or non-relativistic finite-difference time-domain method for electromagnetic problems involving matter in motion. In the conventional treatment, problems with moving sources, observers or scatterers are handled by transforming fields between frames using the Voigt–Lorentz transformations. In Boutayeb's approach no such transformation is used: the moving objects are simply relocated in the computational grid at every time step of the ordinary FDTD time loop, so that time is implicitly absolute and a single grid — effectively a single preferred frame — carries the whole problem. Maxwell's equations are solved in that grid without modification.

This "brute-force" method is presented as being appropriate for the non-relativistic speeds encountered in nearly all antenna, propagation and radar problems, and it has the pedagogical consequence that any agreement it produces with relativistic formulas is obtained without the relativistic postulates. Boutayeb and his co-workers (notably Mohammad Marvasti) have applied it to moving plane-wave and line sources, moving observers, moving metallic and dielectric cylinders, moving metallic slabs and half-spaces at oblique incidence, moving resistive sheets, partially reflecting surfaces, non-uniform (accelerated) motion, aircraft in motion, and full three-dimensional moving structures.

From these simulations he derives analytical formulas for the Doppler frequency shift and for radiated field amplitudes and compares them term by term with the standard relativistic expressions. Several of the reported results are of direct interest to critics of Special Relativity: the amplitude of the electric field radiated by a moving plane-wave source is found not to grow with the speed of motion when the source impedance is small, and the Doppler shift obtained depends on which body is in motion — source, observer or scatterer — rather than on relative velocity alone, which is what an absolute-time, medium-like treatment of the electromagnetic field would predict.

Classical accounts of relativistic test experiments

Boutayeb has used the same numerical framework to reconstruct the classic experimental supports of relativity theory. He has published FDTD analyses of stellar aberration and of Fizeau's experiment with moving water, including Fresnel drag in a moving dielectric slab illuminated by a plane wave, and an FDTD analysis of the Sagnac effect as it is employed in the Global Positioning System. In each case the effect is produced by classical field propagation past moving matter within a single absolute-time grid, rather than by frame transformations. He has also examined the electromagnetic response of a moving metal interface under different electric-field boundary conditions, and has revisited Oliver Heaviside's faster-than-light problem numerically.

Replicating quantum phenomena classically

Boutayeb's more recent work extends the same programme from relativity to quantum theory. In papers such as "Analogy between a moving line source illuminating a metallic wire and Compton scattering experiment", "Simulating Compton-like shift via dual-wire scattering in FDTD" and "Using classical electromagnetism for replicating some quantum phenomena", he argues that phenomena usually taken as decisive evidence for the photon can be reproduced by classical fields interacting with moving charges.

In his account the Compton shift arises as a classical Doppler scattering effect — radiation scattered from a moving electron (modelled numerically as a moving wire) returns shifted in exactly the observed way — and is confirmed by FDTD simulation rather than by photon–electron billiard-ball kinematics. The Planck blackbody spectrum, on his treatment, emerges from the velocity distribution of electrons combined with classical field–electron interaction, connected through a velocity–wavelength relation, so that no quantisation of the field is required to obtain the spectral shape. The photoelectric effect is reinterpreted as a classical transfer of energy that is nevertheless consistent with the observed frequency threshold. Boutayeb presents these results not as refutations but as an invitation to re-examine where the boundary between classical and quantum physics actually lies — arguing that a good deal of what is routinely called quantum behaviour follows from Maxwell's equations plus the motion of matter.

CNPS talks

He has presented in the CNPS online seminar series:

Works

  • "Simulating Compton-Like Shift via Dual-Wire Scattering in FDTD", Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, vol. 67, no. 12, e70494 (2025)
  • "Using Classical Electromagnetism for Replicating some Quantum Phenomena", IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation / USNC-URSI (2025)
  • "FDTD Computational Analysis of Heaviside Faster-Than-Light Problem", IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation / USNC-URSI (2025)
  • "Response of a Moving Metal Interface for Different Electric Field Boundary Conditions", IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation / USNC-URSI (2025)
  • "Radiated Field and Energy From a Uniformly Moving Electromagnetic Plane Wave Source", The Journal of Engineering, 2025 (1), e70109 (2025)
  • "Analysis of Doppler Radars With a Numerical Method", IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques (2025)
  • "Electromagnetic Response of a Uniformly Moving Resistive Sheet", Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, vol. 66, no. 11, e70021 (2024)
  • "Numerical Study of a Moving Dielectric Slab Illuminated by a Plane Wave With the Inclusion of Fresnel Drag", IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, vol. 72, no. 11, pp. 8904–8909 (2024)
  • "Stellar Aberration and Fizeau's Experiment with Moving Water, Using the FDTD Method", International Microwave and Antenna Symposium (IMAS) (2024)
  • "Moving Structures in a 3D FDTD Code", International Microwave and Antenna Symposium (IMAS) (2024)
  • "Analysis of Electromagnetic Problems in the Presence of Non-uniform Movements", Journal of Microwaves, Optoelectronics and Electromagnetic Applications, vol. 23 (2024)
  • "Electromagnetic Scattering from Aircraft in Motion: Algorithm and Analysis", International Conference on Computing, Internet of Things and Microwave Systems (2024)
  • "Analogy Between a Moving Line Source Illuminating a Metallic Wire and Compton Scattering Experiment", Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, vol. 66, no. 1, e33999 (2024)
  • Mohammad Marvasti and Halim Boutayeb, "Analysis of Moving Bodies with a Direct Finite Difference Time Domain Method", Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society Journal, vol. 38, no. 11, pp. 829–840 (November 2023)
  • "FDTD Analysis of the Sagnac Effect Employed in the Global Positioning System", IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, vol. 71, no. 11, pp. 9119–9123 (2023)
  • "Numerical Study of Electromagnetic Waves with Sources, Observer, and Scattering Objects in Motion", IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, vol. 72, no. 8, pp. 4421–4430 (2023)
  • "Electromagnetic Analysis of Moving Structures in a Moving Reference Frame", The Journal of Engineering, 2023 (11), e12302 (2023)
  • "Non-relativistic Finite Difference Time Domain Method for Electromagnetic Problems with Moving Bodies", IEEE MTT-S International Conference on Numerical Electromagnetic and Multiphysics Modeling and Optimization (2023)
  • "Moving Metallic Slab Illuminated by a Plane Wave: Theory and Numerical Analysis Using the Finite Difference Time Domain Method", Progress in Electromagnetics Research M, vol. 118, pp. 25–35 (2023)
  • "Analysis of Moving Dielectric Half-Space with Oblique Plane Wave Incidence Using the Finite Difference Time Domain Method", Progress in Electromagnetics Research M, vol. 115, pp. 119–128 (2023)
  • "Analysis of Moving Bodies with the FDTD Method", 17th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP), pp. 1–5 (2023)

External links

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