We are concerned with the acoustic scattering problem by many small rigid obstacles of arbitrary shapes. We give a sufficient condition on the number M and the diameter a of the obstacles as well as the minimum distance d between them under which the Foldy-Lax approximation is valid. Precisely, if we use single layer potentials for the representation of the scattered fields, as is done sometimes in the literature, then this condition is (M −1) a d 2 < c, with an appropriate constant c, while if we use double layer potentials, then a weaker condition of the form √ M − 1 a d < c is enough. In addition, we derive the error in this approximation explicitly in terms of the parameters M, a, and d. The analysis is based, in particular, on the precise scalings of the boundary integral operators between the corresponding Sobolev spaces. As an application, we study the inverse scattering by the small obstacles in the presence of multiple scattering. B 1 , B 2 , . . . , B M be M open, bounded, and simply connected sets in R 3 with Lipschitz boundaries 1 containing the origin. We assume that the Lipschitz constants of B j , j = 1, . . . , M, are uniformly bounded. We set D m := B m + z m to be the small bodies characterized by the parameter > 0 and the locations z m ∈ R 3 , m = 1, . . . , M. Let U i be a solution of the Helmholtz equation (Δ + κ 2 )U i = 0 in R 3 . We denote by U s the acoustic field scattered by the M small bodies D m ⊂ R 3 due to the incident field U i . We restrict ourselves to (1) the plane incident waves, U i (x, θ) := e ikx·θ , with the incident direction θ ∈ S 2 , with S 2 being the unit sphere, and (2) the scattering by rigid bodies. Hence the total field U t := U i + U s satisfies the following exterior Dirichlet problem of the acoustic waves:
Introduction and statement of the results. Let