Inverse problems for linear hyperbolic equations using mixed formulations

Abstract

We introduce in this document a direct method allowing to solve numerically inverse type problems for linear hyperbolic equations. We first consider the reconstruction of the full solution of the wave equation posed in $\Omega\times (0,T)$ - $\Omega$ a bounded subset of $\mathbb{R}^N$ - from a partial distributed observation. We employ a least-squares technique and minimize the $L^2$-norm of the distance from the observation to any solution. Taking the hyperbolic equation as the main constraint of the problem, the optimality conditions are reduced to a mixed formulation involving both the state to reconstruct and a Lagrange multiplier. Under usual geometric optic conditions, we show the well-posedness of this mixed formulation (in particular the inf-sup condition) and then introduce a numerical approximation based on space-time finite elements discretization. We prove the strong convergence of the approximation and then discussed several examples for $N=1$ and $N=2$. The problem of the reconstruction of both the state and the source term is also addressed.