Analytic extension and reconstruction of obstacles from few measurements for elliptic second order operators

Abstract

We deal with an inverse obstacle problem for general second order scalar elliptic operators with real principal part and analytic coefficients near the obstacle. We assume that the boundary of the obstacle is a non-analytic hypersurface. We show that, when we put Dirichlet boundary conditions, one measurement is enough to reconstruct the obstacle. In the Neumann case, we have results only for n = 2, 3 in general. More precisely, we show that one measurement is enough for n = 2 and we need 3 linearly independent inputs for n = 3. However, in the case for the Helmholtz equation, we only need n − 1 linearly independent inputs, for any n ≥ 2. Here n is the dimension of the space containing the obstacle. These are justified by investigating the analyticity properties of the zero set of a real analytic function. In addition, we give a reconstruction procedure for each case to recover the shape of obstacle. Although we state the results for the scattering problems, similar results are true for the associated boundary value problems.