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.

It is well-known that one-dimensional isentropic gas dynamics has two elementary waves, i.e., shock wave and rarefaction wave. Among the two waves, only the rarefaction wave can be connected to a vacuum. Given a rarefaction wave with one-side vacuum state to the compressible Euler equations, we can construct a sequence of solutions to one-dimensional compressible isentropic NavierStokes equations which converge to the above rarefaction wave with vacuum as the viscosity tends to zero. Moreover, the uniform convergence rate is obtained. The proof consists of a scaling argument and elementary energy analysis based on the underlying rarefaction wave structures.

The dynamics of dilute electrons can be modelled by the fundamental VlasovPoissonBoltzmann system which describes mutual interactions of the electrons through collisions in the self-consistent electric field. In this paper, it is shown that any smooth perturbation of a given global Maxwellian leads to a unique global-in-time classical solution when either the mean free path is small or the background charge density is large. Moreover, the solution converges to the global Maxwellian when time tends to infinity. The analysis combines the techniques used in the study of conservation laws with the decomposition of the Boltzmann equation introduced in [17, 19] by obtaining new entropy estimates for this physical model.

This work concerns the analysis of wave propagation in random media. Our medium of interest is sea ice, which is a composite of a pure ice background and randomly located inclusions of brine and air. From a pulse emitted by a source above the sea ice layer, the main objective of this work is to derive a model for the backscattered signal measured at the source/detector location. The problem is difficult in that, in the practical configuration we consider, the wave impinges on the layer with a non-normal incidence. Since the sea ice is seen by the pulse as an effective (homogenized) medium, the energy is specularly reflected and the backscattered signal vanishes in a first order approximation. What is measured at the detector consists therefore of corrections to leading order terms, and we focus in this work on the homogenization corrector. We describe the propagation by a random Helmholtz equation, and derive an expression of the corrector in this layered framework. We moreover obtain a transport model for quadratic quantities in the random wavefield in a high frequency limit.

We show that in a tubular domain with sufficiently small width, the normal and tangential gradients of a harmonic function have almost the same L 2 norm. This estimate yields a sharp estimate of the pressure in terms of the viscosity term in the Navier-Stokes equation with no-slip boundary condition. By consequence, one can analyze the Navier-Stokes equations simply as a perturbed vector diffusion equation instead of as a perturbed Stokes system. As an application, we describe a rather easy approach to establish a new isomorphism theorem for the non-homogeneous Stokes system.