Abstract
A variational method is given for determining the essential supremum of the surface conductivity of a partially coated anisotropic dielectric medium from a knowledge of the far field pattern of the time-harmonic electric field at fixed frequency corresponding to an incident plane wave. It is assumed that the shape of the scatterer has been determined (e.g., by solving the far field equation and using the linear sampling method). Numerical examples are given for the scalar case with constant surface conductivity.