On the injectivity of the circular Radon transform arising in thermoacoustic tomography

The circular Radon transform integrates a function over the set of all spheres with a given set of centers. The problem of injectivity of this transform (as well as inversion formulas, range descriptions, etc.) arises in many fields from approximation theory to integral geometry, to inverse problems for PDEs, and recently to newly developing types of tomography. The article discusses known and provides new results that one can obtain by methods that essentially involve only the finite speed of propagation and domain dependence for the wave equation.Comment: To appear in Inverse Problem

Regularity of Kobayashi metric

We review some recent results on existence and regularity of Monge-Amp\`ere exhaustions on the smoothly bounded strongly pseudoconvex domains, which admit at least one such exhaustion of sufficiently high regularity. A main consequence of our results is the fact that the Kobayashi pseudo-metric k on an appropriare open subset of each of the above domains is actually a smooth Finsler metric. The class of domains to which our result apply is very large. It includes for instance all smoothly bounded strongly pseudoconvex complete circular domains and all their sufficiently small deformations.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures - The previously announced main result had a gap. In this new version the corrected statement is given. To appear on the volume "Geometric Complex Analysis - Proceedings of KSCV 12 Symposium

Pluripolar hulls and fine analytic structure

We discuss the relation between pluripolar hulls and fine analytic structure. Our main result is the following. For each non polar subset $S$ of the complex plane $\mathbb C$ we prove that there exists a pluripolar set $E \subset (S \times \mathbb C)$ with the property that the pluripolar hull of $E$ relative to $\mathbb C^2$ contains no fine analytic structure and its projection onto the first coordinate plane equals $\mathbb C$.Comment: 14 pages, revised version, to appear in Indagationes Mathematica

Intersection of valuation rings in k[x,y]k[x,y]

We associate to any given finite set of valuations on the polynomial ring in two variables over an algebraically closed field a numerical invariant whose positivity characterizes the case when the intersection of their valuation rings has maximal transcendence degree over the base fields. As an application, we give a criterion for when an analytic branch at infinity in the affine plane that is defined over a number field in a suitable sense is the branch of an algebraic curve