Recovering piecewise constant refractive indices by a single far-field pattern

Abstract

We are concerned with the inverse scattering problem of recovering an inhomogeneous medium by the associated acoustic wave measurement. We prove that under certain assumptions, a single far-field pattern determines the values of a perturbation to the refractive index on the corners of its support. These assumptions are satisfied, for example, in the low acoustic frequency regime. As a consequence if the perturbation is piecewise constant with either a polyhedral nest geometry or a known polyhedral cell geometry, such as a pixel or voxel array, we establish the injectivity of the perturbation to far-field map given a fixed incident wave. This is the first unique determinancy result of its type in the literature, and all of the existing results essentially make use of infinitely many measurements.