Inverse Heat Source Problems from Boundary Flux and Interior Observations on Sets of Low Hausdorff Dimension

Abstract

This paper investigates conditional stability for inverse source problems for the heat equation with a known temporal factor and an unknown spatial component in a bounded $C^{1,1}$ domain. We focus on observations supported on sets of low Hausdorff dimension and establish conditional stability in this setting. For boundary observations on compact sets of positive $q$-dimensional Hausdorff content, we establish logarithmic stability from full-time boundary flux observations and double-logarithmic stability from delayed-time boundary flux observations. The admissible dimensional ranges are $q>d-2$ when the observation set is contained in a flat boundary patch and $q>d-1-c_{d+1}$ on a general $C^{1,1}$ boundary, where $c_{d+1}>0$ depends only on the dimension. A key ingredient in deriving these results is a new boundary spectral inequality for the Dirichlet Laplacian, which controls a finite Dirichlet spectral sum through observations of the normal derivative of its elliptic extension on such a boundary set. Our results also cover inverse heat source problems with interior observations on sets of positive $q$-dimensional Hausdorff content for some $q>d-1$, yielding logarithmic stability from full-time observations for general sources in $H_0^1(\Omega)$ and H\"older stability from terminal-time observations for sources in a suitable spectral Gevrey class.