Piecewise constant positive potentials with practically the same fixed energy phase shifts (Q3152134)

Recent theoretical results assure that a potential is uniquely defined by a sufficiently large subset of its phase shifts at any fixed energy level. However, two different potentials can produce almost identical fixed-energy phase shifts, some examples give oscillating sign-changing. In this paper the authors present four examples of positive spherically symmetric piecewise-constant finite-range potentials having practically the same phase shifts (at a fixed energy level). The existence of such potentials shows that the inverse scattering problem with fixed-energy data can be very ill-posed even if the energy level is not too small. This paper also describes a hybrid stochastic deterministic method for global minimization used for the construction of these potentials.