Quantitative stability of Gel'fand's inverse boundary problem

Abstract

In Gel'fand's inverse problem, one aims to determine the topology, differential structure and Riemannian metric of a compact manifold $M$ with boundary from the knowledge of the boundary $\partial M,$ the Neumann eigenvalues $\lambda_j$ and the boundary values of the eigenfunctions $\varphi_j|_{\partial M}$. We show that this problem has a stable solution with quantitative stability estimates in a class of manifolds with bounded geometry. More precisely, we show that finitely many eigenvalues and the boundary values of corresponding eigenfunctions, known up to small errors, determine a metric space that is close to the manifold in the Gromov-Hausdorff sense. We provide an algorithm to construct this metric space. This result is based on an explicit estimate on the stability of the unique continuation for the wave operator.