Observation of vibrating systems at different time instants

Abstract

In this paper, we obtain new observability inequalities for the vibrating string. This work was motivated by a recent paper by A. Szij\'art\'o and J. Heged\H{u}s in which the authors ask the question of determining the initial data by only knowing the position of the string at two distinct time instants. The choice of the observation instants is crucial and the estimations rely on the Fourier series expansion of the solutions and results of Diophantine approximation.