A direct reconstruction method for radiating sources in Maxwell’s equations with single-frequency data

Abstract This paper presents a fast and robust numerical method for reconstructing point-like sources in the time-harmonic Maxwell’s equations given Cauchy data at a fixed frequency. This is an electromagnetic inverse source problem with broad applications, such as antenna synthesis and design, medical imaging, and pollution source tracing. We introduce new imaging functions and a computational algorithm to determine the number of point sources, their locations, and associated moment vectors, even when these vectors have notably different magnitudes. The number of sources and locations are estimated using significant peaks of the imaging functions, and the moment vectors are computed via explicitly simple formulas. The theoretical analysis and stability of the imaging functions are investigated, where the main challenge lies in analyzing the behavior of the dot products between the columns of the imaginary part of the Green’s tensor and the unknown moment vectors. Additionally, we extend our method to reconstruct small-volume sources using an asymptotic expansion of their radiated electric field. We provide numerical examples in three dimensions to demonstrate the performance of our method.