Dense sets and far field patterns for acoustic waves in an inhomogeneous medium

Abstract

In this paper, we shall obtain two results on the class of far field patterns corresponding to the scattering of time harmonic acoustic plane waves by an inhomogeneous medium of compact support. Although the problem of characterizing the class of far field patterns is of basic importance in inverse scattering theory, very little is known about this class other than the fact that the far field patterns are entire functions of their independent (complex) variables for each positive fixed value of the wave number. In particular, the class of far field patterns is not all of L2(∂Ω) where ∂Ω is the unit sphere and this implies that the inverse scattering problem is improperly posed since the far field patterns are, in practice, determined from inexact measurements. The purpose of this paper is to show that while the class of far field patterns corresponding to the scattering of time harmonic plane waves by an inhomogeneous medium is not all of L2(∂Ω), it is dense in L2(∂Ω) for sufficiently small values of the wave number. In addition, a related result will be obtained for a special translation of the class of far field patterns. Analogous results for the scattering of time harmonic acoustic waves by a homogeneous scattering obstacle have recently been obtained by Colton [1], Colton and Kirsch [2], Colton and Monk [3, 4] and Kirsch [8].