A hypersurface containing the support of a Radon transform must be an ellipsoid. I: The symmetric case (Q2659517)

The present paper comprises five sections. Section~1 defines the Radon transform and distribution spaces on manifolds. The author introduces Arnold's conjecture [\textit{V.~I. Arnold} (ed.), Arnold's problems. Translated and revised edition of the 2000 Russian original. Berlin: Springer; Moscow: PHASIS (2004; Zbl 1051.00002)], which is inspired by a famous lemma in Newton's Principia [\textit{V.~I. Arnol'd} and \textit{V.~A. Vasil'ev}, Notices Am. Math. Soc. 36, No.~9, 1148--1154 (1989; Zbl 0693.01005)]. It asserts that if $V$, the volume of one of the connected components, is an algebraic function, then $n$ must be odd and $D$ must be an ellipsoid. Considering $n$ as even, the proof for the same was given by \textit{V.~A. Vassiliev} [Applied Picard-Lefschetz theory. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society (AMS) (2002; Zbl 1039.32039)] and assuming $n$ is odd and $V$ is a polynomial function, Koldobsky, Merkurjev and Yaskin proved this in [\textit{A.~Koldobsky} et al., Adv. Math. 320, 876--886 (2017; Zbl 1377.52005)]. Theorem~1 is the main result of the paper and asserts that, if $D$ is a symmetric bounded convex domain, then if there exists a distribution $f\neq 0$ with support in $\overline D$ such that the Radon transform of $f$ is supported on the set of supporting planes for $D$, then $\partial D$ must be an ellipsoid. The set of tangent planes to an ellipsoid is a quadratic hypersurface in the space of hyperplanes, hence is itself an ellipsoid. An arbitrary distribution $g$ on the manifold of hyperplanes is expressed and evaluated to be equal to the Radon transform of a compactly supported distribution and also supported to planes of submanifolds $\partial D$, in Section~2. In Section~3, the distribution $g$ is defined for the range of the Radon transform under different conditions. The polynomial identities are discussed and Theorem~2 is proved which implies that the supporting function $\rho$ must be a quadratic polynomial and $\partial D$ is an ellipsoid when $\rho(\omega)>0$. Under some assumptions, Theorem~1 is proved in Section~4. In Section~5, assuming a semilocal version of Theorem~1, Theorem~3 is proved, which says that $D$ must be equal to an ellipsoid in some neighbourhood of every point, hence be globally equal to an ellipsoid.