A Note on the Transport Method for Hybrid Inverse Problems

Abstract

There are several hybrid inverse problems for equations of the form $\nabla \cdot D \nabla u - \sigma u = 0$ in which we want to obtain the coefficients $D$ and $\sigma$ on a domain $\Omega$ when the solutions $u$ are known. One approach is to use two solutions $u_1$ and $u_2$ to obtain a transport equation for the coefficient $D$, and then solve this equation inward from the boundary along the integral curves of a vector field $X$ defined by $u_1$ and $u_2$. It follows from an argument of Guillaume Bal and Kui Ren that for any nontrivial choices of $u_1$ and $u_2$, this method suffices to recover the coefficients on a dense set in $\Omega$. This short note presents an alternate proof of the same result from a dynamical systems point of view.