Inverse Electromagnetic Scattering by a Penetrable Chiral Object ()
1. Introduction
In this paper, we consider a time-harmonic electromagnetic scattering problem by a chiral dielectric with a perfectly conducting core. Chiral media exhibit optical activity that a chiral body cannot be brought into congruence with its mirror image by translation and rotation. They are examples of media that are characterized by two generalized constitutive relations in which the electric and magnetic fields are coupled by a material parameter, chirality. In this work, chirality is introduced via the Drude-Born-Fedorov equations which are symmetric under time-reversality and duality transformation [1]. An electromagnetic field, that is incident upon a chiral obstacle, is composed of left-circularly polarized and right-circularly polarized components which are propagated in an isotropic and homogeneous medium independently with different phase speeds. In applications, we use Bohren transformation where the electric and magnetic fields are expressed in terms of Beltrami fields that solve first order differential equations [2]. For details of the physical properties of electromagnetic scattering in chiral media we refer to the books [1] and [2]. In recent years, direct and inverse scattering problems in chiral media have been studied in many scientific publications. In [3] the authors proved that the classical Silver-Müller radiation condition remains valid in chiral media while in [4] the same authors proved existence and uniqueness of solution to a diffraction problem of a plane electromagnetic field by a chiral thin layer covering a perfectly conducting object. We also refer to [5] and [6] where the well posedness of the direct electromagnetic scattering problem has been studied for a chiral dielectric and by an impedance screen in chiral media respectively. Uniqueness of the inverse obstacle scattering problem in chiral media for the case of a two-dimensional chiral scatterer using boundary integral equation approach has been studied in [7] and for a chiral dielectric by establishing an orthogonality type result in [8].
The inverse scattering problem has been studied extensively and there are numerous research papers concerning both uniqueness theorems and determining physical and geometrical properties of the obstacle. In [9] the author proved a uniqueness theorem for a transmission problem by means of boundary integral equation methods. Uniqueness theorems for scattering from a piecewise homogeneous medium were studied considering either the same wave number in [10] or different wave numbers between the layers of the scatterer in [11]. Applications of the inverse scattering problem can be found in radar, geophysical exploration and medical imaging. In particular, chiral media falls within the research area of detecting an obstacle that may be (partially) coated with an unknown material in order to avoid its identification. Concerning uniqueness theorems for electromagnetic scattering by a perfect conductor we refer to the books [12] [13], whereas by homogeneous anisotropic media in [14].
For uniqueness results to the inverse obstacle scattering problem, we indicatively refer to [15] for acoustic scattering and [16] for elastic waves. In [17] uniqueness issues for scattering by an obstacle with an impedance boundary condition using the mixed reciprocity relation were proved.
In Section 2, we study the well-posedness of the direct scattering problem by the variational method using Calderon operator. In Section 3, we concentrate on the unique determination of the obstacle from a knowledge of the far-field pattern that corresponds to incident plane waves with arbitrary directions of propagation and polarizations and a fixed real wave number. Moreover, a mixed reciprocity relation for chiral media is proved which will be used in the proof of the uniqueness theorem.
Formulation of the problem
In what follows we give a precise formulation of the dimensionless scattering problem. Let D be a bounded domain with a known C2-boundary
. The domain D, which will be called the scatterer, is divided into two homogeneous, non intersecting layers D1 and D2 by a C2-surface S1 as shown in Figure 1. The domain D1 is filled with a homogeneous and isotropic chiral material with chirality measure
, electric permittivity
, and magnetic permeability
while the domain D2 is a perfectly conducting core. The exterior region
of the scatterer is an isotropic, infinite, homogeneous achiral medium with electric permittivity
and magnetic permeability
. In domain D1 chirality is introduced via the Drude-Born-Fedorov constitutive relations [1] where the electric displacement D and the magnetic induction B are connected with the total electric and magnetic fields E and H,
Figure 1. Chiral dielectric with perfectly conducting core.
(1)
In a source free region we have
(2)
where we have suppressed a time dependence of
,
being the angular frequency. From above equations, for the electric and magnetic fields in a chiral medium we take
(3)
(4)
where
and
with
[1].
Let
be a time harmonic plane electromagnetic wave incident upon the scatterer D and let
be the corresponding scattered field. Then the total electromagnetic field
in D0 is given by
(5)
It is convenient to consider a dimensionless version of the problem. Therefore, we replace the fields
,
with
and
respectively. Similar scaling holds for the scattered and incident fields (see [12] for achiral and [18] for chiral case). Then, the transmission problem we study is described by the following equations
(6)
(7)
where
. We note that k0 is the wave number in D0 while k is not a wave number but a short hand notation [1]. The transmission conditions we impose on the boundary S0 are given by [18]
(8)
where
is the unit outward normal to S0,
and
. For the boundary of the perfectly conducting core D2, we have
(9)
We assume that all physical parameters are real positive constants. The scattered field satisfies the Silver-Müller radiation condition
(10)
uniformly in all directions
.
2. Fundamental Principles
In this section, we study the well-posedness of the scattering problem (5)-(10). We will first prove that the corresponding homogeneous scattering problem has only the trivial solution.
Theorem 1. The scattering problem (5)-(10) admits at most one solution.
Proof. We set
then
(11)
(12)
where
,
in
. We consider the corresponding homogeneous scattering problem (
,
) and we multiply the complex conjugate of (11) by the magnetic field
and (12) by
(complex conjugate of
), we apply the divergence theorem in D1
(13)
Taking into account (11), (12) and the boundary condition on S1, we get
(14)
The real part of (14) gives
where the transmission conditions (8) has been used. By Theorem 6.10 of [12], (Rellich’s lemma), we deduce that
in
. Then,
from (6). The transmission conditions (14) on S0 and the continuity of the fields give
(15)
Finally, by Holmgren’s uniqueness theorem [19] we conclude that
in D1.
In order to study a general transmission problem we need to define the following Sobolev spaces:
where
is a ball of radius
that contains the scatterer D with
and
is the completion of
. In order to study the existence of solution to this problem we need to define the following space for the domain D1 with
:
equipped with the norm
We set
and we define the space of the require solution
We restate the problem (5)-(10) for the scattered electric field by eliminating the magnetic field and taking into account that the incident field is a solution of Equation (6) we have the following mixed boundary value problem:
Given
,
and
, find
such that:
(16)
(17)
(18)
(19)
(20)
(21)
where
,
,
and
and the field E is the scattered field of the problem (5)-(10). Also,
,
denote the limit values of E when the variable tends to the surface S0 from outside and inside, respectively. We have the following result.
Theorem 2. Let
,
,
then the problem (16)-(21) has a unique solution
satisfying
(22)
where
is independent of
.
Proof. Let
. We multiply (16) with a vector test function
, apply successively the Gauss theorem for E and
on
and taking into account the transmission boundary conditions we get the variational formulation for the problem (16)-(21)
(23)
where
is the electric to magnetic Calderon operator defined in [13],
chosen such that
on the boundary S1. Next, we define the following bilinear form
(24)
for all
. We also set
(25)
therefore we deduce that (23) via (24)-(25) can be written
(26)
We will present a brief proof for the existence of the solution to (26) following the book [13] and the paper [6]. Due to Theorem 1 and the equivalence between the scattering problem (16)-(21) and (26) the latter has at most one solution [13].
By the definition of
, there exists a function such that
. If we set
, then
on S1 and substituting in (26) we get
(27)
If
is a solution of (27) then
is a solution to the equivalent problem (26). We follow ([13], Theorem 10.2) and [6] and by setting the space of functions
we prove that (27) has a unique solution in
for every
(28)
Next, we use the Helmholtz decomposition as in ([13], Section 10.3.1). To this end, we define the space
and we prove that X can be written as the direct sum of
and
It can be shown that
is compactly embedded in
following the proof of Lemma 10.4 page 268 in [13]. We seek solution
where
and
. Substituting in (27) we take,
Via (62) and the definition of space
we get
(29)
We can show that (29) has a unique solution in
following a similar proof to theorem 10.6 page 271 [13]. The estimate (22) follows from Equations (62), (29) and a duality argument ([13], p: 272).
3. The Inverse Scattering Problem
In order to establish uniqueness for the inverse scattering problem, we will prove a mixed reciprocity relation. We assume that the scatterer D is excited by a plane and a spherical electromagnetic wave. The mixed reciprocity theorem relates the scattered field due to the incident plane electric wave and the far-field pattern due to the incident spherical wave. Such reciprocity relations are used in the point-source method for solving inverse scattering problems [20]. A mixed reciprocity theorem is contained in [21] for chiral media.
The plane electromagnetic wave for achiral case (in normal form) is
(30)
(31)
where the unit vector d is the direction of propagation and the constant vector q is the polarization. By writing
,
,
,
we denote the dependence on the direction of propagation d and polarization q for the total fields in D0 and D1, the scattered fields and the far-field patterns, respectively. The incident spherical electromagnetic wave due to a point source with position vector
, with respect to the origin, is given by
(32)
(33)
where
and
. The wave field
represents the field generated by an electric dipole with polarization p. We shall denote the total fields in D0 and D1, the far-field patterns and the scattered fields by writing
,
,
, and
, respectively.
As it is well-known, [1], in a homogeneous isotropic chiral medium, the electromagnetic field is composed of Left Circularly Polarized (LCP) and Right Circularly Polarized (RCP) components which are propagated with different face speeds. In the chiral domain D1 the electromagnetic field has to be expressed in terms of LCP and RCP Beltrami fields
and
respectively via the Bohren decomposition (see [1] [2]),
,
. Hence, using the similar scaling as before we get
(34)
These fields satisfy the equations
(35)
where
and
given by
are wave numbers. From (35) by applying the curl operator we get
Also
and
are divergence free and satisfy the vector Helmholtz equation
Using Beltrami fields, we consider an incident plane electromagnetic wave in a chiral medium of the form [1]
(36)
(37)
where the LCP component is
(38)
and the RCP component is
(39)
with corresponding polarizations
and
. We also assume that the LCP and RCP waves have the same direction of propagation d and it holds
([1], p: 476). We denote by
,
,
and
the dependence on the direction of propagation and the polarizations
,
of the total fields in D0 and D1, the scattered fields and the far-field patterns, respectively. Next, we consider the Bohren decomposition for the chiral spherical waves due to a source located at a point with vector position
(40)
(41)
where the LCP point source
is given by
(42)
where
with
be the identity dyadic and
The RCP point source
is given by
(43)
where
and
More details for spherical waves in a chiral medium can be found in [21]. The spherical chiral [21] and achiral [18] fields satisfy the Silver-Müller radiation condition [3]. We also state that when the point source tends to infinity the spherical waves become plane with direction of propagation
[18] [21]. For two electromagnetic fields
and
on a surface S we introduce the Twersky notation
(44)
In particular, for the chiral case by applying the Bohren decomposition
,
,
, relation (44) becomes
(45)
For the spherical waves we prove the following properties.
Lemma 1. Let
be an incident spherical electromagnetic wave due to a point source
and let
be an incident plane wave with direction of propagation -d. Then, we have
(46)
(47)
where
is a large sphere of radius r enclosing the scatterer D and the small sphere
which is of radius
centered at a.
Proof. The incident spherical and the scattered waves satisfy the Silver-Müller radiation condition (10). Hence, we can make use of the radiation conditions (59) and (62) of the paper [22] and the proof of (46) is immediate. The proof of (47) is based on Lemma 8 of [22] taking into account the normal form of the spherical incident wave (32), (33).
Lemma 2. Let
be an incident spherical chiral electromagnetic wave due to a point source
and let
be an incident plane electromagnetic wave with direction of propagation −d. Then, we have
(48)
(49)
where
is a small sphere of radius
centered at a and
is a large sphere of radius r enclosing the scatterer D.
Proof. For the proof of (48), taking into account that
,
satisfy the Silver-Müller radiation condition (10), we apply the same procedure as in Lemma 1 for (46). For Equation (49) we use (45) to obtain the relation
We substitute
,
by (42) and (43) respectively and after some calculations we obtain for the LCP part
The third integral on the right-hand side vanishes by the Stoke’s theorem. Applying the mean value theorem on the remaining two integrals and letting
we obtain
(50)
We follow the same procedure for the RCP part
(51)
The proof is complete.
Remark 1. We note that relations (47) of Lemma 1 and (49) of Lemma 2 are in general valid for bounded functions.
Now we will prove a mixed reciprocity theorem that connects the far-field pattern of a spherical wave with the scattered field of a plane wave.
Theorem 3. Let
be an incident achiral electric spherical wave due to a point source
with polarization p and
be an incident electric plane wave with polarization q and direction of propagation −d. We also consider a chiral incident electric wave
due to a point source located at
. Then, we have
(52)
(53)
Proof
For
, see Figure 2, in view of (5) and due to the bilinearity of (44), we have
Figure 2. Point source in D0.
(54)
The incident fields are regular solutions of (16) in D. Applying the Gauss theorem, we take
(55)
For the scattered fields, we consider a sphere
of radius r large enough to include the scatterer. We apply the Gauss’ theorem to transform (44) from the boundary
to the boundary of the sphere
. Letting
we pass to the radiation zone and via the radiation condition we conclude
(56)
For the integral of the total fields, we use the transmission conditions (8) on S0 and the boundary condition (9) on S1 and applying Gauss’ theorem in D1 we conclude to
(57)
For the term
we consider again the sphere
and a small sphere
of radius
centered at a which is inside the
. We apply Gauss’ theorem in exterior to
and
and interior to
, we take
Next by applying Lemma 1 we get
(58)
Finally, taking into account the integral representation of the far-field pattern relation (6.24) of [12] we have
(59)
Substituting (55)-(59) into (54) we get (52).
For
, see Figure 3, taking into account (5) and due to the bilinearity of (44), we have
Figure 3. Point source in D1.
(60)
We consider again the sphere
. Applying the divergence theorem in the region exterior to
and interior to
and letting
we pass to the radiation zone. Taking into account that the scattered and spherical waves satisfy the Silver-Müller radiation condition and by using Lemma 2 we get
(61)
As in the relation (59), for the chiral case we have
(62)
Next, we apply the Gauss’ theorem in D1 apart from the sphere
The incident fields are regular solutions of (16) in D2 and hence
For the sphere
, we obtain
Letting
we apply Lemma 2 (where the total plane wave has been replaced by the incident plane wave) we get
Therefore
(63)
For the integral of the total exterior fields, we apply the conditions (8) and (9) and using Gauss’ theorem in D1 apart from the sphere
we have that
The second integral of the right-hand side is equal to zero since
and
are regular solutions of (7) in the sphere
in D1. For the first integral of the right-hand side, we apply Formula (49) and we get
(64)
Taking into account that
,
and substituting (61)-(63) into (60) we get (53).
Lemma 3. Let
be subsets of D and let G be the unbounded component of
. Assume that
for all
,
, where
is the electric far field pattern of the scattered field
that corresponds to the same plane wave
incident to
. Let
be the chiral spherical electric wave due to a source located at a point with position vector
and let
be the unique solution of the problem:
(65)
(66)
(67)
(68)
(69)
(70)
Assume that
is the unique solution of the problem (65)-(70) with D2 replaced by
and D1 replaced by
. Then we have
(71)
Remark 2. We note that the problem (65)-(70) has a unique solution due to Theorem 2 (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Uniqueness of D2.
Proof. Since
for all
,
Rellich’s lemma [12] (Theorem 6.9, p.164) gives
By continuity on the boundary S0 and by using Holmgren’s uniqueness theorem ([19] p: 194) we get that
Taking into account that
, the corresponding Beltrami fields in the chiral domain
satisfy
(72)
(73)
from which we conclude
and
. Therefore we obtain
,
for every
. We make use of the mixed reciprocity Theorem 3 to conclude to
By Rellich’s lemma again we have
By continuity on the boundary S0 and by using Holmgren’s theorem we derive that
which proves the lemma.
We consider a scatterer
with boundary
with a perfectly conducting obstacle
inside
. Then, we can formulate the following theorem.
Theorem 4. Let
and
be two perfectly conducting obstacles such that
, for all
and
, for the same incident electric field
, then
(
).
Proof. Let
(
). Then without loss of generality we may choose
and
and
such that the sequence
is contained in
, where G is the unbounded component of
and
the outward normal to
at
. Taking into account that
and in view of the well posedness of the direct problem (65)-(70) we have that
for appropriate positive constant c uniformly for
and for all polarizations
. We also note that on the boundary S1 it holds,
for all
. This is a contradiction, which implies
.
4. Conclusion
In this work, we are concerned with the scattering model for a perfectly conducting core inside a chiral layer. First, we proved the well-posedness of the direct problem. In the sequel, we focused on the determination of the shape of the core. For this purpose, we proved a mixed reciprocity theorem which was used for the proof of the solution’s uniqueness of an inverse scattering problem (i.e. the determination of the core’s shape). In the same manner, we can work when the scatterer has more layers. A generalization of this work in case that the scatterer is embedded in a chiral environment is under consideration.