Superresolution in recovering embedded electromagnetic sources in high contrast media

The purpose of this work is to provide a rigorous mathematical analysis of the expected superresolution phenomenon in the time-reversal imaging of electromagnetic (EM) radiating sources embedded in a high contrast medium. It is known that the resolution limit is essentially determined by the sharpness of the imaginary part of the EM Green's tensor for the associated background. We first establish the close connection between the resolution and the material parameters and the resolvent of the electric integral operator, via the Lippmann-Schwinger representation formula. We then present an insightful characterization of the spectral structure of the integral operator for a general bounded domain and derive the pole-pencil decomposition of its resolvent in the high contrast regime. For the special case of a spherical domain, we provide some quantitative asymptotic behavior of the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions. These mathematical findings shall enable us to provide a concise and rigorous illustration of the superresolution in the EM source reconstruction in high contrast media. Some numerical examples are also presented to verify our main theoretical results. © 2020 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics