Identifiability of Diffusion Coefficients for Source Terms of Non-Uniform Sign

Abstract

The problem of recovering a diffusion coefficient $a$ in a second-order elliptic partial differential equation from a corresponding solution $u$ for a given right-hand side $f$ is considered, with particular focus on the case where $f$ is allowed to take both positive and negative values. Identifiability of $a$ from $u$ is shown under mild smoothness requirements on $a$, $f$, and on the spatial domain $D$, assuming that either the gradient of $u$ is nonzero almost everywhere, or that $f$ as a distribution does not vanish on any open subset of $D$. Further results of this type under essentially minimal regularity conditions are obtained for the case of $D$ being an interval, including detailed information on the continuity properties of the mapping from $u$ to $a$.