Optical Aharonov-Bohm effect: an inverse hyperbolic problems approach (Q1006300)

The author studies wave type equations on a space time cylinder whose (spatial) section is obtained by removing several smooth disjoint obstacles from a simply connected smooth domain. The unknowns of the equations have to vanish in the past, to satisfy the Dirichlet condition on the boundaries of the obstacles and to coincide with some given source term on the boundary of the simply connected domain. The latter equations give rise to natural (hyperbolic) Dirichlet-to-Neumann operators. The main theorem of the paper states that if the Dirichlet-to-Neumann maps associated to two hyperbolic operators on domains as above (with possibly different obstacles but the same simply connected domain) coincide at all times, then the operators and the cylinders coincide up to a diffeomorphism which is affine in the time variable and coincide with the identity on the boundary of the simply connected domain. Two applications to inverse problems are given and an interpretation in term of the optical Aharonov-Bohm effect for slowly moving media is discussed.