Analysis of the monotonicity method for an anisotropic scatterer with a conductive boundary

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we consider the inverse scattering problem associated with an anisotropic medium with a conductive boundary. We will assume that the corresponding far–field pattern is known/measured and we consider two inverse problems. First, we show that the far–field data uniquely determines the boundary coefficient. Next, since it is known that anisotropic coefficients are not uniquely determined by this data we will develop a qualitative method to recover the scatterer. To this end, we study the so–called monotonicity method applied to this inverse shape problem. This method has recently been applied to some inverse scattering problems but this is the first time it has been applied to an anisotropic scatterer. This method allows one to recover the scatterer by considering the eigenvalues of an operator associated with the far–field operator. We present some simple numerical reconstructions to illustrate our theory in two dimensions. For our reconstructions, we need to compute the adjoint of the Herglotz wave function as an operator mapping into H 1 of a small ball.