The Recovery of Semilinear Potentials Satisfying Null Conditions From Scattering Data

Abstract

We construct oscillatory solutions of fully semilinear wave equations in Minkowski space satisfying a null condition of the form $$\square u:=(-\partial_{x_0}^2 +\sum_{j=1}^n \partial_{x_j}^2 )u= q(x,u)((\partial_{x_0}u)^2-|\nabla_{x'}u|^2),$$ $$x=(x_0,x'), \;\ x'=(x_1,\ldots, x_n) \text{ and } x_0=t \text{ is the time variable,}$$ on an interval $x_0\in [-T,T]$, $T<\infty$ arbitrary, which consist of the superposition of a non-oscillatory background solution and a single phase train of highly oscillatory waves of wave length $h\ll1$ and amplitudes given by powers of $h$; the waves interact with the nonlinearity and we measure the response $u(x_0,x')|_{x_0=T'}$ at a fixed time $x_0=T'<T$. We show that the coefficient of amplitude $h$ of the oscillatory part of the nonlinear geometric optics expansion of the solution determines the light-ray transform of a vector field associated with $q(x,u)$, which determines $q(x,u)$ uniquely in the maximal region determined by the data. Our methods also work for systems of semilinear wave equations satisfying null conditions, but in this paper we focus on the scalar case.