Tensor tomography: progress and challenges (Q741464)

The authors survey recent results on the integral geometry problem of recovering a tensor field from its integrals along geodesics. This paper studies the X-ray transform in the plane, which encodes the integral as a function \(f\) in \(\mathbb{R}^2\) over straight lines: \[ Rf(s,\omega)=\int_{-\infty}^\infty f(s\omega+t\omega^\perp)\,dt,\quad s\in {\mathbb R}, \quad \omega \in S^1, \] where \(\omega^\perp\) is the rotation of \(\omega\) by 90 degrees counterclockwise. The X-ray transform forms the basis for many imaging methods such as CT and PET in medical imaging. This paper also proposes several open problems.