This paper aims to mathematically advance the field of quantitative thermo-acoustic imaging. Given several electromagnetic data sets, we establish for the first time an analytical formula for reconstructing the absorption coefficient from thermal energy measurements. Since the formula involves derivatives of the given data up to the third order, it is unstable in the sense that small measurement noises may cause large errors. However, in the presence of measurement noise, the obtained formula, together with a noise regularization technique, provides a good initial guess for the true absorption coefficient. We finally correct the errors by deriving a reconstruction formula based on the least square solution of an optimal control problem and prove that this optimization step reduces the errors occurring and enhances the resolution.

This is a continuation of our series of works for the inhomogeneous Boltzmann equation. We study qualitative properties of classical solutions; the full regularization in all variables, uniqueness, non-negativity and convergence rate to the equilibrium, to be precise. Together with the results of Parts I and II about the well-posedness of the Cauchy problem around the Maxwellian, we conclude this series with a satisfactory mathematical theory for the Boltzmann equation without angular cutoff.

In this note, we consider regularity theory for a fractional p-Laplace operator which arises in the complex interpolation of the Sobolev spaces, the Hs,p-Laplacian. We obtain the natural analogue to the classical p-Laplacian situation, namely Cs+αloc-regularity for the homogeneous equation.

Based on the existence theory on the Boltzmann equation with external forces in infinite vacuum, in this paper, we will study the L1 and BV-type stability of the classical solutions for small initial data. The stability results generalize those for the Boltzmann equation without force to the case with external force. In particular, we show that the stability can be established for the soft potentials directly, while the stability for the hard potentials and hard sphere model is obtained through the construction of some nonlinear functionals. The functionals thus constructed generalize those constructed in [S.-Y. Ha, Nonlinear functionals of the Boltzmann equation and uniform stability estimates, J. Differential Equations 215 (2005) 178205] for the case without force to capture the effect of the force term on the time evolution of the solutions. 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The propagation and interaction in more than one space dimension of localized pulse solutions (so-called light bullets) to the sine-Gordon [SG] equation is studied both asymptotically and numerically. Similar solutions and their resemblance to solitons in integrable systems were observed numerically before in vector Maxwell systems. The simplicity of SG allows us to perform an asymptotic analysis of counterpropagating pulses, as well as a fully resolved computation over rectangular domains. Numerical experiments are carried out on single pulse propagation and on two pulse collision under different orientations. The particle nature, as known for solitons, persists in these two space dimensional solutions as long as the amplitudes of initial data range in a finite interval, similar to the conditions on the vector Maxwell systems.