Various stability estimates for the problem of determining an initial heat distribution from a single measurement

Abstract

We consider the problem of determining the initial heat distribution in the heat equation from a point measurement. We show that this inverse problem is naturally related to the one of recovering the coefficients of Dirichlet series from its sum. Taking the advantage of existing literature on Dirichlet series, in connection with M{\"u}ntz 's theorem, we establish various stability estimates of H{\"o}lder and logarithmic type. These stability estimates are then used to derive the corresponding ones for the original inverse problem, mainly in the case of one space dimension. In higher space dimensions, we are interested to an internal or a boundary measurement. This issue is closely related to the problem of observability arising in Control Theory. We complete and improve the existing results.