Identification of multilayered particles from scattering data by a clustering method

A multilayered particle is illuminated by plane acoustic or electromagnetic waves of one or several frequencies. We consider the inverse scattering pr oblem for the identification of the layers and of the refraction coefficien ts of the scatterer in a non-Born region of scattering, Local deterministic and global probabilistic minimization methods are studied. A special reduc tion procedure is introduced to reduce the dimensionality of the minimizati on space. Deep's and the multilevel single-linkage methods for global minim ization are used for the solution of the inverse problem. Their performance is analyzed for various multilayer configurations. (C) 2000 Academic Press .