Feasible tomography schemes for large particle numbers must possess, besides an appropriate data acquisition protocol, an efficient way to reconstruct the density operator from the observed finite data set. Since state reconstruction typically requires the solution of a nonlinear large-scale optimization problem, this is a major challenge in the design of scalable tomography schemes. Here we present an efficient state reconstruction scheme

Abstract. In this article, we present the Free Material Optimization (FMO) problem for plates and shells based on Naghdi's shell model. In FMO -a branch of structural optimization -we search for the ultimately best material properties in a given design domain loaded by a set of given forces. The optimization variable is the full material tensor at each point of the design domain. We give a basic formulation of the problem and prove existence of an optimal solution. Lagrange duality theory allows to identify the basic problem as the dual of an infinite-dimensional convex nonlinear semidefinite program. After discretization by the finite element method the latter problem can be solved using a nonlinear SDP code. The article is concluded by a few numerical studies.