Global uniqueness and stability in determining the damping and potential coefficients of an inverse hyperbolic problem (Q533046)

The authors study an inverse problem of finding the unknown interior damping and potential coefficients in a second-order hyperbolic equation subject to non-homogeneous Neumann boundary conditions. Special attention is paid to the determination of both coefficients in one shot by means of an additional measurement of Dirichlet boundary trace of the solution in a portion of the boundary. They establish two canonical results for the inverse problem, global uniqueness, and the stability, under weak regularity requirements on the data and sharp conditions on the complementary part of the domain. The inverse problem under consideration is a nonlinear problem. The authors introduce an auxiliary linear problem and establish uniqueness and stability results for the problem. The main result of the paper is the stability of the nonlinear inverse problem. Proofs of the results rely on sharp Carleman estimates for the second-order hyperbolic equations, continuous observability inequality, and sharp interior and boundary regularity theory for second-order hyperbolic equations with Neumann boundary data.