Travelling times in scattering by obstacles

Abstract

The paper deals with some problems related to recovering information about an obstacle in an Euclidean space from certain measurements of lengths of generalized geodesics in the exterior of the obstacle. The main result is that if two obstacles satisfy some generic regularity conditions and have (almost) the same traveling times, then the generalized geodesic flows in their exteriors are conjugate on the non-trapping part of their phase spaces with a time preserving conjugacy. In the case of a union of two strictly convex domains in the plane, a constructive algorithm is described to recover the obstacle from traveling times.