Recovering damping and potential coefficients for an inverse non-homogeneous second-order hyperbolic problem via a localized Neumann boundary trace (Q379655)

Let \(\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^n\) be an open bounded domain with \(C^2\) boundary \(\Gamma\). Consider the wave equation \[ w_{tt}(x,t) =\Delta_x w(x,t) +q_1(x)w_t(x,t)+q_0(x)w(x,t) \] in \(Q=\Omega\times[0,T]\). The authors study an inverse problem of recovering the damping \(q_1\) and the potential \(q_0\) from a single solution \(w\). The initial values \(w_0=w\) and \(w_1=w_t\) at \(t=T/2\) and Dirichlet traces of \(w\) on \(\Gamma\times[0,T]\) are held fixed. The main result of the paper is the unique and Lipschitz continuous dependence of \((q_0,q_1)\) on the Neumann trace \(\partial w/\partial\nu\) at an observed part \(\Gamma_1\times[0,T]\) of the space time boundary (Theorems 1.3 and 1.4). The main geometrical assumption is the existence of a nowhere vanishing gradient field \(h=\nabla d\) which is (weakly) inward at the unobserved part \(\Gamma_0=\Gamma\setminus\Gamma_1\); the Hessian of \(d\) is positive definite uniformly on the closure of \(\Omega\). The initial values are assumed to satisfy \(w_0=0\) and \(|w_1(x)|\geq v_1>0\). Moreover, there are a priori regularity assumptions on the \(q_j\), and the time interval \(T\) has a positive lower bound. The proof reduces the (non-linear) inverse problem to a linear inverse problem. The latter is proved by Carleman estimates (Bukhgeim--Klibanov method), and by results which the second author obtained in joint work.