Recovery of coefficients for a convection-diffusion equation from partial data

This article is devoted to the inverse problem of determining the zeroth- and first-order coefficients, depending on both the time and space variables, in a parabolic equation from partial boundary measurements of the flux generated by Dirichlet excitations.

More precisely, we establish the unique determination of a time-dependent convection term and potential from the partial Dirichlet-to-Neumann map associated with the corresponding parabolic equation, where the Neumann measurements are restricted to the portion of the boundary illuminated from a point located outside the closure of the domain.

Our main objective is to extend to parabolic equations several observations that have thus far been confined to the elliptic setting and to exploit these properties to recover a general class of coefficients depending on both time and space variables.

To achieve this, we develop a suitable class of special solutions to the parabolic equation, introduce a new family of Carleman estimates with nonlinear weights, and combine these tools with partial data results for the X-ray transform.

The principal difficulty of the present work stems from the fact that, unlike the existing literature on partial data inverse problems for parabolic equations, both the phase of the special solutions and the weight of the corresponding Carleman estimates are nonlinear.

As a byproduct of our analysis, we establish a new class of Carleman estimates for parabolic equations with nonlinear weights, which may be viewed as the parabolic analogue of the notion of limiting Carleman weights in the elliptic setting.