When, in the spring of 1979, H.P. Baltes presented me with the precursor of this vo 1 ume, the book on "Inverse Source Problems in Opti cs", I expressed my gratitude in a short note, 11hich in translation, reads: "Dear Dr. Ba ltes, the mere titl e of your unexpected gift evokes memori es of a period, which, in the terminology of your own contribution, would be described as the Stone Age of the Inverse Problem. Those were pleasant times. Walter Kohn and I lived in a cave by ourselves, drew pictures on the walls, and nobody seemed to care. Now, however, Inversion has become an Industry, which I contemplate with as much bewilderment as a surviving Tasmanian aborigine gazing at a modern oil refinery with its towers, its fl ares, and the confus i ng maze of its tubes." The present volume makes me feel even more aboriginal - impossible for me to fathom its content. What I can point out, however, is one of the forgotten origins of the Inverse Scattering Problem of Quantum Mechanics: Werner Heisenberg's "S-Matrix Theory" of 1943. This grandiose scheme had the purpose of eliminating the notion of the Hamiltonian in favour of the scattering operator. If Successful, it would have done away once and for all with any kind of inverse problem.

Here is a clearly written introduction to three central areas of inverse problems: inverse problems in electromagnetic scattering theory, inverse spectral theory, and inverse problems in quantum scattering theory. Inverse problems, one of the most attractive parts of applied mathematics, attempt to obtain information about structures by nondestructive measurements. Based on a series of lectures presented by three of the authors, all experts in the field, the book provides a quick and easy way for readers to become familiar with the area through a survey of recent developments in inverse spectral and inverse scattering problems.

The aim of this book is to provide basic knowledge of the inverse problems arising in various areas in mathematics, physics, engineering, and medical science. These practical problems boil down to the mathematical question in which one tries to recover the operator (coefficients) or the domain (manifolds) from spectral data. The characteristic properties of the operators in question are often reduced to those of Schrödinger operators. We start from the 1-dimensional theory to observe the main features of inverse spectral problems and then proceed to multi-dimensions. The first milestone is the Borg–Levinson theorem in the inverse Dirichlet problem in a bounded domain elucidating basic motivation of the inverse problem as well as the difference between 1-dimension and multi-dimension. The main theme is the inverse scattering, in which the spectral data is Heisenberg’s S-matrix defined through the observation of the asymptotic behavior at infinity of solutions. Significant progress has been made in the past 30 years by using the Faddeev–Green function or the complex geometrical optics solution by Sylvester and Uhlmann, which made it possible to reconstruct the potential from the S-matrix of one fixed energy. One can also prove the equivalence of the knowledge of S-matrix and that of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map for boundary value problems in bounded domains. We apply this idea also to the Dirac equation, the Maxwell equation, and discrete Schrödinger operators on perturbed lattices. Our final topic is the boundary control method introduced by Belishev and Kurylev, which is for the moment the only systematic method for the reconstruction of the Riemannian metric from the boundary observation, which we apply to the inverse scattering on non-compact manifolds. We stress that this book focuses on the lucid exposition of these problems and mathematical backgrounds by explaining the basic knowledge of functional analysis and spectral theory, omitting the technical details in order to make the book accessible to graduate students as an introduction to partial differential equations (PDEs) and functional analysis.

With contributions by numerous experts

This classic book provides a rigorous treatment of the Riesz?Fredholm theory of compact operators in dual systems, followed by a derivation of the jump relations and mapping properties of scalar and vector potentials in spaces of continuous and H?lder continuous functions. These results are then used to study scattering problems for the Helmholtz and Maxwell equations. Readers will benefit from a full discussion of the mapping properties of scalar and vector potentials in spaces of continuous and H?lder continuous functions, an in-depth treatment of the use of boundary integral equations to solve scattering problems for acoustic and electromagnetic waves, and an introduction to inverse scattering theory with an emphasis on the ill-posedness and nonlinearity of the inverse scattering problem.

This book presents a comprehensive tutorial on propagation, diffraction and scattering problems from the basic principles of physical optics. Beginning with the fundamental differential and integral equations for wavefields, the text presents an exhaustive discussion on the extinction theorem as a non-local boundary condition; this has been extensively employed for the rigorous solution of scattering and diffraction problems.There is also an in-depth presentation of the topic of scattering from rough surfaces, in particular the phenomenon of enhanced backscattering, as well as a detailed development of the angular spectrum representation of fields leading to questions on non-diffraction beams. Of key interest in near field optical microscopy and nanooptics, the S-matrix theory based on the angular spectrum for propagating components and the recently discovered properties of the S-matrix for evanescent components of wavefields are considered. In addition, the book deals with the healing effect of phase conjugation on waves, and focuses on some applications concerning the relationship with time reversal.Readers will also find discussions on image recovery from partial information data (phase problems and super-resolution problems), as well as a chapter on the fundamentals of near field optical microscopy techniques, including the hot topic of propagation in negative index media.