Nonlinearity helps the convergence of the inverse Born series

Abstract: In previous work of the authors, we investigated the Born and inverse Born series for a scalar wave equation with linear and nonlinear terms, the nonlinearity being cubic of Kerr type [8]. We reported conditions which guarantee convergence of the inverse Born series, enabling recovery of the coefficients of the linear and nonlinear terms. In this work, we show that if the coefficient of the linear term is known, an arbitrarily strong Kerr nonlinearity can be reconstructed, for sufficiently small data. Additionally, we show that similar convergence results hold for general polynomial nonlinearities. Our results are illustrated with numerical examples.