The interior transmission problem for anisotropic Maxwell's equations and its applications to the inverse problem

The interior transmission problem appears naturally in the study of the inverse scattering problem of determining the shape of a penetrable medium from a knowledge of the time harmonic incident waves and the far field patterns of the scattered waves. We propose a variational study of this problem in the case of Maxwell's equations in an inhomogeneous anisotropic medium. Then we apply the obtained results to build an 'extented far field' operator and give a characterization of the medium from the knowledge of the range of this operator. We then show how the linear sampling method can be viewed as an approximation of this characterization. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.