Rigidity of Travelling Times for Strictly Convex Obstacles in Riemannian Manifolds

Abstract

Let $K$ and $L$ be two disjoint unions of strictly convex obstacles contained within a Riemannian manifold with boundary $S$ of dimension $m\geq 2$. The sets of travelling times $\mathcal{T}_K$ and $\mathcal{T}_L$ of $K$ and $L$, respectively, are composed of triples $(x,y,t)\in\partial S\times\partial S\times\mathbb{R}^+$ where $t$ is the length of a billiard trajectory with endpoints $x$ and $y$ that reflects elastically on $K$ (or $L$ for $(x,y,t)\in\mathcal{T}_L$). It has been shown (arXiv:2309.11141) that (under some natural curvature bounds on $S$) if $\mathcal{T}_K=\mathcal{T}_L$ and $K$ and $L$ were equivalent up to tangency then $K = L$. In this paper we remove this requirement for $K$ and $L$, and show that if $\mathcal{T}_K = \mathcal{T}_L$ then $K = L$ whenever $m\geq 3$.