Recovery of the absorption coefficient in radiative transport from a single measurement

In this paper, we investigate the recovery of the absorption coefficient from boundary data assuming that the region of interest is illuminated at an initial time. We consider a sufficiently strong and isotropic, but otherwise unknown initial state of radiation. This work is part of an effort to reconstruct optical properties using unknown illumination embedded in the unknown medium. We break the problem into two steps. First, in a linear framework, we seek the simultaneous recovery of a forcing term of the form $\sigma(t,x,\theta) f(x)$ (with $\sigma$ known) and an isotropic initial condition $u_{0}(x)$ using the single measurement induced by these data. Based on exact boundary controllability, we derive a system of equations for the unknown terms $f$ and $u_{0}$. The system is shown to be Fredholm if $\sigma$ satisfies a certain positivity condition. We show that for generic term $\sigma$ and weakly absorbing media, this linear inverse problem is uniquely solvable with a stability estimate. In the second step, we use the stability results from the linear problem to address the nonlinearity in the recovery of a weak absorbing coefficient. We obtain a locally Lipschitz stability estimate

Feller semigroups with boundary conditions

This expository paper is devoted to the problem of construction of Feller semigroups with Ventcel’(Wentzell) boundary conditions for elliptic Waldenfels operators.Intuitively our result may be stated as follows: We can construct a Feller semigroup corresponding to such a diffusion phenomenon that a Markovian particle moves both by jumps and continuously in the state space until it“dies”at which time it reaches the set where the absorption phenomenon occurs.In the Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Functional Analysis and Approximation Theory(F. Altomare et al., eds.

Cardinality and counting quantifiers on omega-automatic structures

We investigate structures that can be represented by omega-automata, so called omega-automatic structures, and prove that relations defined over such structures in first-order logic expanded by the first-order quantifiers `there exist at most $\aleph_0$ many', 'there exist finitely many' and 'there exist $k$ modulo $m$ many' are omega-regular. The proof identifies certain algebraic properties of omega-semigroups. As a consequence an omega-regular equivalence relation of countable index has an omega-regular set of representatives. This implies Blumensath's conjecture that a countable structure with an $\omega$-automatic presentation can be represented using automata on finite words. This also complements a very recent result of Hj\"orth, Khoussainov, Montalban and Nies showing that there is an omega-automatic structure which has no injective presentation

Cardinality and counting quantifiers on omega-automatic structures

We investigate structures that can be represented by omega-automata, so called omega-automatic structures, and prove that relations defined over such structures in first-order logic expanded by the first-order quantifiers `there exist at most $aleph_0$ many\u27, \u27there exist finitely many\u27 and \u27there exist $k$ modulo $m$ many\u27 are omega-regular. The proof identifies certain algebraic properties of omega-semigroups. As a consequence an omega-regular equivalence relation of countable index has an omega-regular set of representatives. This implies Blumensath\u27s conjecture that a countable structure with an $omega$-automatic presentation can be represented using automata on finite words. This also complements a very recent result of Hj"orth, Khoussainov, Montalban and Nies showing that there is an omega-automatic structure which has no injective presentation

Brownian Motions on Metric Graphs

Brownian motions on a metric graph are defined. Their generators are characterized as Laplace operators subject to Wentzell boundary at every vertex. Conversely, given a set of Wentzell boundary conditions at the vertices of a metric graph, a Brownian motion is constructed pathwise on this graph so that its generator satisfies the given boundary conditions.Comment: 43 pages, 7 figures. 2nd revision of our article 1102.4937: The introduction has been modified, several references were added. This article will appear in the special issue of Journal of Mathematical Physics celebrating Elliott Lieb's 80th birthda