Abstract/Summary

We consider time-harmonic acoustic scattering by planar sound-soft (Dirichlet) and sound-hard (Neumann) screens embedded in $\R^n$ for $n=2$ or $3$. In contrast to previous studies in which the screen is assumed to be a bounded Lipschitz (or smoother) relatively open subset of the plane, we consider screens occupying arbitrary bounded subsets. Thus our study includes cases where the screen is a relatively open set with a fractal boundary, and cases where the screen is fractal with empty interior. We elucidate for which screen geometries the classical formulations of screen scattering are well-posed, showing that the classical formulation for sound-hard scattering is not well-posed if the screen boundary has Hausdorff dimension greater than $n-2$. Our main contribution is to propose novel well-posed boundary integral equation and boundary value problem formulations, valid for arbitrary bounded screens. In fact, we show that for sufficiently irregular screens there exist whole families of well-posed formulations, with infinitely many distinct solutions, the distinct formulations distinguished by the sense in which the boundary conditions are understood. To select the physically correct solution we propose limiting geometry principles, taking the limit of solutions for a sequence of more regular screens converging to the screen we are interested in, this a natural procedure for those fractal screens for which there exists a standard sequence of prefractal approximations. We present examples exhibiting interesting physical behaviours, including penetration of waves through screens with "holes" in them, where the "holes" have no interior points, so that the screen and its closure scatter differently. Our results depend on subtle and interesting properties of fractional Sobolev spaces on non-Lipschitz sets.