Local uniqueness for the inverse boundary problem for the two-dimensional diffusion equation

Abstract

We study an inverse boundary problem for the diffusion equation in ℝ2. Our motivation is that this equation is an approximation of the linear transport equation and describes light propagation in highly scattering media. The diffusion equation in the frequency domain is the nonself-adjoint elliptic equation div(D grad u) - (cμa + iω0) u = 0; ω0 ≠ 0, where D and μa are the diffusion and absorption coefficients. The inverse problem is the reconstruction of D and μa inside a bounded domain using only measurements at the boundary. In the two-dimensional case we prove that the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map, corresponding to any one positive frequency ω0, determines uniquely both the diffusion and the absorption coefficients, provided they are sufficiently slowly-varying. In the null-background case we estimate analytically how large these coefficients can be to guarantee uniqueness of the reconstruction.