The inverse problem for radiation scattering

A brief survey of recent theoretical progress on the inverse scattering problem for radiation scattering from reflective boundaries and variable indices of refraction. The theory of radiation scattering is concerned primarily with the far-field relations between incident and scattered radiation in the presence of a scattering object. The primary, or direct, problem of this theory is to develop quantitative information about these scattering relations from a knowledge of the scattering object. The secondary, or inverse, problem, on the other hand, is to determine the nature of the object from an analysis of the scattering relations.