Injectivity of the Heisenberg X-ray transform

Abstract

We initiate the study of X-ray tomography on sub-Riemannian manifolds, for which the Heisenberg group exhibits the simplest nontrivial example. With the language of the group Fourier transform, we prove an operator-valued incarnation of the Fourier Slice Theorem, and apply this new tool to show that a sufficiently regular function on the Heisenberg group is determined by its line integrals over sub-Riemannian geodesics. We also consider the family of taming metrics gϵ approximating the sub-Riemannian metric, and show that the associated X-ray transform is injective for all ϵ>0. This result gives a concrete example of an injective X-ray transform in a geometry with an abundance of conjugate points.