Inverse coefficient problem for Grushin-type parabolic operators

Karine Beauchard, Piermarco Cannarsa

Published 2013-12-08Version 1

The approach to Lipschitz stability for uniformly parabolic equations introduced by Imanuvilov and Yamamoto in 1998 based on Carleman estimates, seems hard to apply to the case of Grushin-type operators studied in this paper. Indeed, such estimates are still missing for parabolic operators degenerating in the interior of the space domain. Nevertheless, we are able to prove Lipschitz stability results for inverse coefficient problems for such operators, with locally distributed measurements in arbitrary space dimension. For this purpose, we follow a strategy that combines Fourier decomposition and Carleman inequalities for certain heat equations with nonsmooth coefficients (solved by the Fourier modes).