Title: FIELD AND SOURCE EQUIVALENCE IN SOURCE RECONSTRUCTION ON 3D SURFACES
Abstract: This paper describes in detail different formulations of the inverse-source problem, whereby equivalent sources and/or fields are to be computed on an arbitrary 3-D closed surface from the knowledge of complex vector electric field data at a specified (exterior) surface.The starting point is the analysis of the formulation in terms of the Equivalence Principle, of the possible choices for the internal fields, and of their practical impact.Love's (zero interior field) equivalence is the only equivalence form that yields currents directly related to the fields on the reconstruction surface; its enforcement results in a pair of coupled integral equations.Formulations resulting in a single integral equation are also analyzed.The first is the single-equation, two-current formulation which is most common in current literature, in which no interior field condition is enforced.The single-current (electric or magnetic) formulation deriving from continuity enforcement of one field is also introduced and analyzed.Single-equation formulations result in a simpler implementation and a lower computational load than the dual-equation formulation, but numerical tests with synthetic data support the benefits of the latter.The spectrum of the involved (discretized) operators clearly shows a relation with the theoretical Degrees of Freedom (DoF) of the measured field for the dual-equation formulation that guarantees extraction of these DoF; this is absent in the single-equation formulation.Examples confirm that singleequation formulations do not yield Love's currents, as observed both with comparison with reference data and via energetic considerations.The presentation is concluded with a test on measured data which shows the stability and usefulness of the dual-equation formulation in a situation of practical relevance.