On the light ray transform of wave equation solutions

Wave equation (35L05) Inverse problems for PDEs (35R30) Global differential geometry of Lorentz manifolds, manifolds with indefinite metrics (53C50) Perturbations of PDEs on manifolds; asymptotics (58J37) Hyperbolic equations on manifolds (58J45) Quantum field theory on curved space or space-time backgrounds (81T20) Relativistic cosmology (83F05)

Abstract: We study the light ray transform on Minkowski space-time and its small metric perturbations acting on scalar functions which are solutions to wave equations. We show that the light ray transform uniquely determines the function in a stable way. The problem is of particular interest because of its connection to inverse problems of the Sachs-Wolfe effect in cosmology.

Review text

Let \(M = [t_{0}, t_{1}]\times {\mathbb R}^{3}\) and let \(g_{M}= =-dt^{2} +dx^{2}\) be the Minkowski metric on \(M\). Consider the Lorentzian manifold \((M, g_{M})\) and the light ray transform \[ X_{M}(f)(\gamma)=\int_{0}^{t_{1}-t_{0}}f(\gamma(\tau))\,d\tau,\ \gamma(\tau)=(t_{0},x_{0})+\tau(t_{1},v),\ f\in C_{0}^{\infty}(M), \] for scalar functions defined on \((M, g_{M})\). Under consideration is the inverse hyperbolic problem of finding the functions \(f_{i}(x)\) \((i=1,2)\) and a solution \(u\) to the problem \[ u_{tt} -\Delta u=0,\ \ u|_{t=t_{0}}=f_{1},\ u_{t}|_{t=t_{0}}=f_{2}, \] under the condition that the light ray transform of \(u\) is given for \(x_{0}\in {\mathbb R}^{3}\), \(v\in {\mathbb S}^{2}\), with \({\mathbb S}^{2}\) the unit sphere in \({\mathbb R}^{3}\). Under certain smoothness assumptions on the data, it is proven that this problem is uniquely solvable and that the solution depends on the data continuously. The connections of this problem with the inverse problems of the Sachs-Wolfe effect in cosmology are discussed.

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