Remarks on the general Funk transform and thermoacoustic tomography (Q619003)

Let \(X\) and \(\Sigma\) be smooth manifolds of dimension \(n>1\) and \(F\) be a closed smooth hypersurface in \(X\times\Sigma\). It is assumed that the natural projection \(\pi:F\to\Sigma\) has rank \(n\) and the mapping \(g:F\to G^{n-1}T(X)\) is a local diffeomorphism, where \(g(x,\sigma)=(x,\theta)\), \(\theta\) is the tangent hyperplane to \(F(\sigma)\) at \(x\) and \(G^{n-1}T(X)\) denotes the variety of \(n-1\)-subspaces in the tangent bundle \(T(X)\) of \(X\). Let \(\Phi\) be a phase function of \(F\). The Funk transform \(M\) for a density \(f\) in \(X\) with compact support is defined by \[ Mf(\sigma)=\underset{\varepsilon\to 0}\lim \frac{1}{2\varepsilon} \int_{|\Phi(\cdot,\sigma)|\leq \varepsilon} f,\quad \sigma\in \Sigma. \] The author obtains two-side estimates for a Sobolev-type norm of the transform \(M\). Some applications to the spherical mean transform are considered.