Imaging polarizable dipoles

We present a method for imaging the polarization vector of an electric dipole distribution in a homogeneous medium from measurements of the electric field made at a passive array. We study an electromagnetic version of Kirchhoff imaging and prove, in the Fraunhofer asymptotic regime, that range and cross-range resolution estimates are identical to those in acoustics. Our asymptotic analysis provides error estimates for the cross-range dipole orientation reconstruction and shows that the range component of the dipole orientation is lost in this regime. A naive generalization of the Kirchhoff imaging function is afflicted by oscillatory artifacts in range, that we characterize and correct. We also consider the active imaging problem which consists in imaging both the position and polarizability tensors of small scatterers in the medium using an array of collocated sources and receivers. As in the passive array case, we provide resolution estimates that are consistent with the acoustic case and give error estimates for the cross-range entries of the polarizability tensor. Our theoretical results are illustrated by numerical experiments.Comment: 35 pages, 18 figure

Truth and Consequences

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Exterior cloaking with active sources in two dimensional acoustics

We cloak a region from a known incident wave by surrounding the region with three or more devices that cancel out the field in the cloaked region without significantly radiating waves. Since very little waves reach scatterers within the cloaked region, the scattered field is small and the scatterers are for all practical purposes undetectable. The devices are multipolar point sources that can be determined from Green's formula and an addition theorem for Hankel functions. The cloaking devices are exterior to the cloaked region