The attenuated ray transform on simple surfaces (Q661935)

The geodesic ray transform, that is, the integration of a function along geodesics, arises as the linearization of the problem of determining a conformal factor of a Riemannian metric on a compact Riemannian manifold with boundary rigidity problem. In the paper under review the authors consider the case of the attenuated geodesic ray transform in two dimensions. A compact Riemannian manifold with boundary is said to be simple if given any two points in the boundary there is a unique minimizing geodesic joining the two points, and if the boundary is strictly convex. The first result of the paper shows that the attenuated ray transform on simple surfaces is injective for any attenuation coefficient. Also, the authors give some other results which follow from the methods presented here. The next theorem considers the attenuated ray transform for combinations of functions and 1-forms. The injectivity result, which also extends the corresponding result for functions, states that these are the only elements in the kernel. Finally, the authors provide a stability estimate and a reconstruction procedure to determine a function from the attenuated geodesic ray transform.