Numerical Stability in an Inverse Scattering Problem

The main result of this paper is a stability theorem for a certain class of difference algorithms designed to give approximate solutions of a model inverse scattering problem in one dimension. This stability result guarantees the convergence of the approximate solutions to the exact solution of the problem as the grid of the difference scheme is refined. We present the result of numerical experiments based on one of these schemes, in which second-order convergence is observed. Furthermore the cost (that is, the dependence on N of the number of arithmetic operations required to compute the solution at N grid points) of the algorithms discussed below is essentially optimal.