Fixed angle inverse scattering with non-constant velocity

Abstract

In this article, we study formally determined inverse problems for wave equations in the presence of a variable sound speed. We prove that by measuring the boundary data of finitely many plane waves and their complementary solutions, one can uniquely recover the unknown coefficients of the highest order terms of a second order hyperbolic operator with time independent coefficients. This improves earlier rigidity results in [10], [11] which compared the wave operator generated by a Riemannian metric with the wave operator generated by the Euclidean metric. We compare two general second order hyperbolic operators with time independent coefficients, with the same lower order terms. However, we require the geometry associated with one of the operators to satisfy a pseudoconvexity condition, a no-caustics condition, and a spanning condition. In particular one of the operators could be a wave operator with the sound speed close to a constant and the other operator could be arbitrary. To prove the results, we introduce the notion of a complementary solution for a generalized plane wave solution generated by an incoming plane wave. The complementary solution extends smoothly, across an interface, the generalized plane wave. The unknown coefficients appear in a transport equation at the interface. We show that the unknown coefficients in the interior can be extracted from this transport equation, from the boundary data, via a sequence of Carleman estimates for the wave operator.