The weighted Doppler transform (Q968762)

The Doppler transform of a compactly supported covector field \(f=\left\{ f_{i}\right\} \) in \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\) is given by \[ \left( x,\theta\right)\mapsto\int f_{j}(x+t\theta)\theta ^{j}dt, \quad \left( x,\theta\right) \in \mathbb{R}^{n}\times S^{n-1} \] The attenuated Doppler transform is similarly defined as: \[ I_{w}f(x,\theta)=\int w(x+t\theta,\theta)f_{j}(x+t\theta)\theta^{j}dt, \] where the weight \(w\) is the total attenuation along the ray \([x,x-\infty \theta]\) with an attenuation factor \(\sigma(x)\) \[ w(x,\theta)=e^{-\int_{-\infty}^{0}\sigma (x+s\theta)ds}. \] The authors work with an \(n\)-dimensional manifold with boundary \(M\) diffeomorphic to a ball where the support of \(f\) lies, and instead of straight lines, they consider integrals over a general family of curves, denoted by \(\Gamma.\) The set \(\Gamma\) is assumed to have the following properties. \ For any \((x,\xi)\in TM\backslash\left\{ 0\right\} \) there exists a unique directed curve in \(\Gamma\) through \(x\) in the direction of \(\xi,\) there is a unique curve in \(\Gamma\) through any given pair of points, smoothly depending on the endpoints, and \(\partial M\) is strictly convex with respect to \(\Gamma.\) \ In particular, the curves in \(\Gamma\) solve the ordinary differential equation \(\ddot{\gamma}=G(\gamma ,\dot{\gamma})\) with some generator \(G(x,\xi).\) The paper studies the weighted Doppler transform \[ I_{w}f(\gamma)=\int w(\gamma(t),\dot{\gamma}(t))f_{j}(\gamma(t))\dot{\gamma }^{j}(t)dt, \] and investigates condition on the weight \(w(x,\xi)\) and on \ the family \(\Gamma\) under which \(I_{w}\) is injective. The authors obtain two main results concerning the injectivity of \(I_{w}\) under the assumption that the weight \(w\) satisfies what is called the elliptic condition. The results are tied to the tomography problem of recovering a covector field on a simple Riemannian manifold based on its weighted Doppler transformation over a family of curves \(\Gamma.\)