No label defined (Q4806021)

The paper is concerned with the analysis of the observability property for solutions of wave equations. This property is usually formulated by an observability inequality, in which the total energy of the solutions is uniformly estimated by a partial measurement. This measurement is the portion of energy localized in a subset of the domain or of its boundary. It is known that the failure of the observability property for the wave equation is closely related to the existence of solutions whose energy is localized near certain curves \((t,x(t))\) in space-time. These curves (called rays) are, in the interior of \(\Omega \), the domain of definition of the equation, solutions of a Hamiltonian system of ordinary differential equations which involves the coefficients of the operator. When one of these trajectories hits the boundary \(\partial\Omega \) it is reflected according to the law of geometric optics. Given a ray \((t,x(t))\) it is possible to construct a sequence of solutions \((u_k)_{k\in \mathbf N}\) of the wave equation such that the amount of their energy outside a ball of radius \(k^{-1/4}\) centered at \(x(t)\) is of the order of \(k^{-1/2}\). These solutions, called Gaussian beams, are known in Optics but relatively new to Mathematics. The authors prove the failure of the observability property for the wave equation in three new situations: (i) A transmission problem for which the construction, introduced by J. Ralston (1982), can be adapted to show the existence of solutions trapped in the inner domain and, thus, contradicting any observability inequality that involves only measurements made in the outer domain. This requires a suitable monotonicity assumtion on the jump of the coefficients. (ii) A wave equation with Hölder continuous coefficients for which the authors show the existence of solutions as localized as one wants near a fixed non-propagating point. The observability property, in this case, fails if the region where the observations occur does not contain this point. (iii) An observability inequality for the constant coefficient wave equation involving a measurement made on a hypersurface contained in the interior of the domain. A number of examples for which observability fails, even though every ray intersects the observation hyper surface are given.