An inverse problem for the fractionally damped wave equation

Abstract

We consider an inverse problem for a Westervelt type nonlinear wave equation with fractional damping. This equation arises in nonlinear acoustic imaging and we show the forward problem is locally well posed. We prove that the smooth coefficient of the nonlinearity can be uniquely determined, based on the knowledge of the source-to-solution map and a priori knowledge of the coefficient, in an arbitrarily small subset of the domain. Our approach relies on a second order linearization as well as the unique continuation property of the spectral fractional Laplacian.