Explicit inversion for variable-speed wave equations on bounded domains

Abstract

We study the reconstruction of the initial pressure $f(x)=p(x,0)$ for the wave model \[ \partial_t^2 p(x,t)=c(x)\Delta_{x}p(x,t)\qquad (x,t)\in\Omega\times[0,\infty), \] posed on a bounded domain $\Omega$ with variable sound speed $c(\cdot)$. From time-resolved boundary measurements, we consider two settings: (i) measurement of $p|_{\partial\Omega\times[0,\infty)}$ under a Robin boundary condition $p+\alpha\,\partial_\nu p=0$ on $\partial\Omega\times[0,\infty)$ with $\alpha\gneq 0$, and (ii) measurement of $\partial_\nu p|_{\partial\Omega\times[0,\infty)}$ under a Dirichlet boundary condition $p=0$ on $\partial\Omega\times[0,\infty)$. Within a unified framework, we present explicit formulas that recover the spectral coefficients $\langle f,\phi_k^B\rangle$ of $f$ with respect to the eigenfunction bases of the operator $-c(\cdot)\Delta_{x}$ for boundary types $B\in\{D,R\}$. The framework integrates variable sound speed with Dirichlet/Robin boundary conditions in a single setting, enabling direct coefficient-level recovery from boundary data.