Abstract
We consider a parabolic equation with a singular potential in a bounded domain The main result is a Lipschitz stability estimate for an inverse source problem of determining a spatial varying factor of the source term We obtain a consistent stability result for any where is the lower bound of and and this condition for is also almost a consistently optimal condition for the existence of solutions. The main method we used is the Carleman estimate, and the proof for the inverse source problem relies on the Bukhgeim–Klibanov method.
MSC:
35K05; 35K67; 35Q40; 35N30; 35A23
1. Introduction and Main Result
The purpose of the article is to study an inverse problem to determine the spatially varying parameter in a parabolic equation with a singular potential. More precisely, we will study an inverse source result for a parabolic equation with variable coefficients in the principal part and an inverse-squared potential of the form . For the application, we refer to the combustion theory [1,2,3,4] and quantum mechanics [5,6,7].
Let be given. is a bounded domain satisfying and . Denote
We are interested in determining the spatially varying parameter of the source term in the system
where , and . , , , and is a real constant. Let be three positive constants. We assume that , where
In fact, the inverse-squared potential of the form appears in some linearized combustion models, such as the following semilinear elliptic equation:
where the nonhomogeneous term is positive, nonlinear, continuous and increasing. h is a convex function with and as . Semilinear equations like (3) describe some applications in combustion theory, like the phenomenon of a ball of isothermal gas in gravitational equilibrium, which was proposed by Kelvin (see [8]).
Those inverse-squared potentials also have a number of applications in quantum mechanics. For instance, in [5], the model involving a linear-plus-inversely linear electric field is used to describe the confinement of neutral fermions, which leads to an effective quadratic-plus-inversely quadratic potential in a Sturm–Liouville problem. Readers can also refer to [6] (p. 157) for some other instances on the context of quantum mechanics.
Let be some non-empty open set satisfying . Let be fixed; then,
Denote
In this article, we consider the following:
Inverse source problem:
Let be given. Determine from in Ω and in , where is the solution of (1).
Our main result is the following theorem.
Theorem 1.
Remark 1.
In fact, using the same idea, we have a similar result for a general elliptic operator instead of the operator in (1).
Corollary 1.
We give the proof of Theorem 1 in Section 4. The idea we followed to determine the source term mainly relies on a global —Carleman estimate, which is proposed by Bukhgeim and Klibanov in [9]. Indeed, this is also the fundamental method to prove the uniqueness and the stability in inverse source problems.
The inverse source problem on a parabolic system with a singular potential in the case of was firstly solved by Vancostenoble [10]. Later, for , we solved the null-controllability problem in [11] and the inverse coefficient problem in [12] for the variable coefficient case. Moreover, we consider the inverse source problem for parabolic equations with different singularities when in [13]. In this article, we extend the inverse source problem in [10] to the case with a general variable coefficient in the principal part. As a result, we establish a Lipschitz stability result for the optimal condition which is almost a consistently optimal condition for the existence of solutions to the system (1).
For the related controllability issues, many results have been studied by predecessors (e.g., [11,14,15,16,17]). In the case of , ref. [15] has proven that we can obtain a null-controllability result for . In [11], we considered the null-controllability problem for a parabolic equation with variable coefficients in the principal part and with a singular potential . Ref. [11] indicates that we can obtain the null-controllability problem for a distributed control in an arbitrary open subset of in the case of . However, for the case of , we proved that we cannot uniformly stabilize regularized approximations of the system by using a control supported in . Furthermore, ref. [16] has proven a null-controllability result in the case within the assumption that singular potential arises at the boundary domain. Ref. [14] analyzed the control properties for a parabolic equation, wherein all the points on the boundary are singular potentials.
This paper is organized as follows: In Section 2, we give the functional setting space. In Section 3, we introduce an improved Carleman estimate which is used to prove our main result. Section 4 is devoted to the proof of our main inverse source result. Section 5 presents some future work. The Appendix A are devoted to the proof of the improved Carleman estimate presented in Section 4.
2. Functional Setting and Well-Posedness
Firstly, there are many related results about the well-posedness of the solution of system (8). Baras and Goldsteint [7,18] discovered that the existence and non-existence of positive solutions to (8) in the case of and is strongly related to the value of and Hardy’s inequality [19]:
where is the optimal constant. The following discoveries were presented by Goidstein and Zhang [20]:
It should be noted that the more general singular potential case when was settled by Cabré and Martel [21].
Secondly, since we assume and using (9), we have
For any p satisfying (2), we introduce a new Hilbert space with the following norm:
In the sub-critical case, , and when (9) implies that is equivalent to the usual norm in However, in the critical case on and the space is strictly larger than
For and , we introduce an unbounded operator:
For the norm is defined by the following:
Using the standard theory of semi-groups, we can obtain:
Theorem 2.
μ is a constant satisfying and Then, the following assertions hold:
The proof of Theorem 2 mainly relies on the fact that the operator generates an analytic semi-group of contractions in the pivot space , whereby applying the standard semi-group theory is sufficient. For more details, readers can refer to [10,20,22].
3. Carleman Estimate
In this paper, we aim to solve the inverse source problem of (1). Indeed, the inverse source problem is one of the most important subjects in partial differential equations. The normal method to prove inverse problems is via the Carleman estimate, which was proposed by Carleman [23] in 1939 to obtain a unique continuation for a two-dimensional elliptic equation. Later, the method of Carleman estimates was applied to more problems, such as the controllability and inverse problems.
The idea of applying Carleman estimates to inverse problems was first proposed by Bukhgeim and Klibanov [9]. So far, there have been many studies published about inverse problems related to normal parabolic equations, for example, Bukhgeim [24], Huang et al. [25], Isakov [26], Klibanov [27,28,29,30], Klibanov and Li [31], Imanuvilov and Yamamoto [32], Yamamoto [33], Yuan and Yamamoto [34], and related references therein. For inverse problems in relation to parabolic equations with singular potentials, we refer to the works of Qin and Li [12], Qin [13], Vancostenoble [10].
In this section, we will give an improved Carleman estimate result compared with [11] for system (8). The most prominent feature of Carleman estimates in this section is the optimization of conditions on . Compared with the condition in [11], Carleman estimates in this section holds for all . According to Section 2, this condition is consistently optimal for the well-posedness of (1). Meanwhile, all constants C in the Carleman estimates are independent of the value of .
In fact, this optimization of conditions on is not obvious. Since the coexistence of the singular potential and the variable coefficient in the principal term, the method of calculation of the Carleman estimate in [10,11,15] cannot be directly applied to our problems. The existence of the variable coefficient leads to the deduction of certain terms like in calculations, which then leads to the fact that cannot be completely controlled by for all in the norm of . In [11], combining the assumption , and Hardy’s inequality (9), we used the following estimate inequality:
In this article, to offset negative terms and obtain an optimal condition on , we introduce some new terms (see (A5)) in the grouping step of the proof of Carleman estimates, and we propose a weighted Hardy’s inequality:
Lemma 1.
Assume that , where is given by (2). Then, for any , there exists a positive constant C such that the following inequality holds:
For the proof of (11), see (A33).
In this section, we assume that , where is given by (2). Let r be a fixed small positive constant that satisfies
Here, is a ball, and henceforth, we denote
Unlike [11,12], r, determined by (12), does not depend on the value of . In fact, this is the key to deduce the improved result that all constants C in the Carleman estimates are independent of the value of .
As in [11], for some , we introduce a smooth function satisfying
and
We introduce as
which is different from in [10,11,12,13,32] but is similar to in [14,15].
Now, we are in a position to state the Carleman estimate.
Theorem 3.
We present the proof in Appendix A.
Remark 2.
Corollary 2.
4. Proof of Theorem 1
Since and , the solution of (1) satisfies sufficient regularity properties (see Theorem 2 (iii)) to proceed to the following computations:
To apply Theorem 3 on instead of , we rewrite the definition of as the following formula:
The other weight functions are defined as in (13), (16) and (17). Denote
Fixing and applying the Carleman estimate (18) with and on there exist and such that, for all the following inequality holds:
On the other hand, since on and
we have
Using we have
Using Young’s inequality and in and (22), we have
and
Using (23)–(26), we obtain
Here, we introduce a lemma obtained from [10].
Lemma 2.
There exists some such that, for all
For the proof of Lemma 2, we refer to section VI.2 in [10].
Combining Lemma 2 and the fact that is bounded on the following equality holds for some , which is fixed and sufficiently large:
We complete the proof of Theorem 1.
5. Future Works
In this article, we consider the inverse source problem for the parabolic equation with a single singularity. It would also be interesting to study the case of multipolar inverse-squared singular potentials. This situation has been considered in [13] for the case of . However, there are no results for the case of variable coefficients in the principal part.
Moreover, in this article, we consider the case when the singularity is in the interior of the domain. However, there are also many applications in combustion theory and quantum mechanics when the singularity is placed on a point of the boundary. In fact, there have not been any inverse problem results in this case.
Finally, we are aiming to solve the inverse problem for the hyperbolic equation with singularities. According to the Bukhgeim–Klibanov method, we need to derive Carleman estimates for a hyperbolic operator with singular potentials. This would be difficult because normal weight functions are hard to compensate the singularity of the potential term. This will be the object of a forthcoming work.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, X.Q.; Methodology, X.Q.; Formal analysis, S.L.; Writing—original draft, X.Q.; Supervision, S.L. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
This research was funded by University Natural Science Research Project of Anhui Province (2023AH050265), and Research Project of Anhui University of Finance and Economics (ACKYA24005).
Data Availability Statement
No new data were created or analyzed in this study.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
Appendix A. Proof of Theorem 3
Now, we will prove Theorem 3. We present the main steps in Appendix A.1 and details of the proof in Appendix A.2.
Appendix A.1. Main Steps
Let us introduce some notations and start some preliminary computations in Carleman estimates. Let
Thus, z satisfies
Then, plugging in (8), we have
with the boundary condition
Instead of a smooth non-negative radial function , which vanishes in in [11], we introduce a new radial function, which is . Let S and A be two operators:
One can deduce from (A3) that
Thus, the inequality
holds, where and denote the norm and the corresponding scalar product in
Denote
Lemma A1.
The following equality holds:
where . denotes the external unit normal vector on the boundary at x. denotes the trace of the Lebesgue measure on .
For the proof, see Appendix A.2.
Appendix A.1.1. Step 1: Lower Bound of the Quantity
Let be the sum of the first-order terms of s without any time derivative of , be the sum of the higher-order terms of s without any time derivative of , and be the terms involving the time derivatives of . We recall (17) and note that , and are fixed, as in (A9), (A12) and (A14).
For
we have the following estimate.
Lemma A2.
For any there exist some positive constants such that for a large enough , the following inequality holds:
where , .
The proof is given in Appendix A.2. It relies on an improved form of Hardy’s inequality (see [35]).
Lemma A3.
For all , there exists a positive constant such that
Lemma A4.
There exists such that, for , the following inequality
holds for any that is large enough. and .
We finally estimate
Define
where and are the same as in (A10).
In Appendix A.2, we shall prove the following.
Lemma A5.
There exists such that, for , the following inequality
holds for any that is large enough. and are the same as in (A13).
Substituting (A10) and (A13) into (A8) and combining them with (A14)–(A16), we obtain a lower bound of :
Appendix A.1.2. Step 2: Estimation on ∂ t z
Next, we will present the estimate of . According to (A5), we have
We will estimate separately in and in .
From the definition of , we obtain , ,
Thus, the estimate of in is the same as [11]. Recalling (A5), we have the following estimate:
where and are constants appearing in (A17), and is denoted as above.
Similarly, in , for , we obtain
Then, we have
where and are the constants appearing in (A17).
Appendix A.1.3. Partial Conclusion: Full Carleman Estimates on z
By (A6), (A7), (A17), (A20) and (A22), we conclude that
Appendix A.1.4. Conclusion: Full Carleman Estimates on w
Similarly to [11], to complete the proof of Theorem 3, we now need to substitute into (A23). This detail is similar to that presented in Subsection 3.1.5 in [11], except for the following estimates.
We note that
Thus, by (A19) and (A21), we have
Moreover,
Using the fact that , along with Young’s inequality, we obtain
for any constant Thus, we arrive at
For , by , we have
The rest of the proof is exactly the same as in Subsection 3.1.5 in [11], which we choose to omit here. We recall Lemma 3.6 in [11], which can be proven by a similar argument as in the proof of Lemma 4.1 in [17].
This ends the proof of Theorem 3.
Appendix A.2. Proofs of Some Technical Lemmas
In this subsection, we present the details of the proof.
Proof of Lemma A1.
Define
Denote . (A7) then becomes
Since most of are the same as in Subsection 3.2 of [11], we only show the different terms.
Computation of :
Computation of :
Computation of :
Computation of :
Computation of :
Computation of :
Computation of :
By these computations and the same terms in [11], we obtain (A8) in Lemma A1.
□
Proof of Lemma A2.
Substituting (17) into (A9), we obtain
where denotes the last three terms of the right-hand side of (A9).
According to Lemma 3.2 in [11], for that is large enough, we obtain
Moreover, following the estimates (A19) and (A21), for that is large enough, we have
Thus,
On the other hand, since and in we decompose in and .
Using in , (12)–(14) for a that is large enough, we have
where Moreover, since for that is large enough, we have
where and .
For any , since , we can apply the improved Hardy’s inequality (A11) to . Thus, there exists a positive constant such that the following inequalities hold:
Thus, we obtain that, for that is large enough, there exist constants such that
Hence, by combining (A30) and (A34), the proof of Lemma A2 is completed. □
Proof of Lemma A4.
We decompose in (A12) as , respectively, in and in .
We recall and the appendix in [11]. We also refer to Lemma 2.7 and its proof in [15]. First, let us compute . We note that, for and that is large enough,
By (13), (14) and , we obtain
where .
Proof of Lemma A5.
For that is large enough, we can obtain
Using (2) and (A38), we can obtain
where for and that are large enough.
Recalling (A27), one has
for any fixed constant and a large enough .
Moreover, noting that in and using Young’s inequality, we know that the following inequality
holds for any fixed constants and , and a that is large enough.
Additionally, one has
and
for all and that are large enough. Thus,
for all and that are large enough.
For any given , we can choose such that
It follows that
for all and that are large enough.
For , there exists a constant such that the following inequalities
hold for all . Therefore, we obtain the inequality stated in Lemma A5. □
References
- Bebernes, J.; Eberly, D. Mathematical Problems from Combustion Theory; Applied Mathematical Sciences; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 1989; Volume 83. [Google Scholar]
- Brezis, H.; Vzquez, J.L. Blow-up solutions of some nonlinear elliptic equations. Rev. Mat. Complut. 1997, 10, 443–469. [Google Scholar]
- Dold, J.W.; Galaktionov, V.A.; Lacey, A.A.; Vzquez, J.L. Rate of approach to a singular steady state in quasilinear reaction-diffusion equations. Ann. Della Sc. Norm. Super. Pisa-Cl. Sci. 1998, 26, 663–687. [Google Scholar]
- Galaktionov, V.; Vzquez, J.L. Continuation of blow-up solutions of nonlinear heat equations in several space dimensions. Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 1997, 1, 1–67. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- De Castro, A.S. Bound states of the Dirac equation for a class of effective quadratic plus inversely quadratic potentials. Ann. Phys. 2004, 311, 170–181. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Reed, M.; Simon, B. Methods of Modern Mathematical Physics; Academic Press: New York, NY, USA, 1979; Volume II. [Google Scholar]
- Baras, P.; Goldstein, J. Remarks on the inverse square potential in quantum mechanics. In Diff. Equat. North-Holland Mathematical Studies; Knowles, I., Lewis, R., Eds.; North-Holland: Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1984; Volume 92, pp. 31–35. [Google Scholar]
- Chandrasekhar, S. An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure; Dover Publ. Inc.: New York, NY, USA, 1985. [Google Scholar]
- Bukhgeim, A.L.; Klibanov, M.V. Uniqueness in the large class of multidimensional inverse problems. Sov. Math. Dokl. 1981, 24, 244–247. [Google Scholar]
- Vancostenoble, J. Lipschitz stability in inverse source problems for singular parabolic equations. Commun. Partial Differ. Equ. 2011, 36, 1287–1317. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Qin, X.; Li, S. The null controllability for a singular heat equation with variable coefficients. Appl. Anal. 2022, 101, 1052–1076. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Qin, X.; Li, S. Local logarithmic stability of an inverse coefficient problem for a singular heat equation with an inverse-square potential. Appl. Anal. 2023, 102, 1995–2017. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Qin, X. Carleman estimate and applications for a heat equation with multiple singularities. Appl. Anal. 2024, 103, 3425–3446. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Biccari, U.; Zuazua, E. Null controllability for a heat equation with a singular inverse- square potential involving the distance to the boundary function. J. Differ. Equ. 2016, 261, 2809–2853. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Ervedoza, S. Control and stabilization properties for a singular heat equation with an inverse square potential. Commun. Partial Differ. Equ. 2008, 33, 1996–2019. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Cristian, C. Controllability of the Heat Equation with an Inverse-Square Potential Localized on the Boundary. SIAM J. Control Optim. 2014, 52, 2055–2089. [Google Scholar]
- Vancostenoble, J.; Zuazua, E. Null controllability for the heat equation with singular inverse-square potentials. J. Funct. Anal. 2008, 254, 1864–1902. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Baras, P.; Goldstein, J. The heat equation with a singular potential. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 1984, 284, 121–139. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Vazquez, J.L.; Zuazua, E. The Hardy inequality and the asymptotic behavior of the heat equation with an inverse-square potential. J. Funct. Anal. 2000, 173, 103–153. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Goldstein, J.A.; Zhang, Q.S. Linear Parabolic Equations with Strong Singular Potentials. Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 2003, 355, 197–211. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Cabré, X.; Martel, Y. Existence versus explosion instantane pour des equations de la chaleur linaires avec potentiel singulier [Existence versus instantaneous blow-up for linear heat equations with singular potential]. C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris 1999, 329, 973–978. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Liskevich, V.A.; Semenov, Y.A. Some problems on Markov semigroups. In SchrÖdinger Operators, Markov Semigroups, Wavelet Analysis, Operator Algebras; Akademie Verlag: Berlin, Germany, 1996; MR 97g:47036, 163–217, Math. Top., 11. [Google Scholar]
- Carleman, T. Sur un problème d’unicité pur les systèmes d’équations aux dérivées partielles à deux variables indépendantes. Ark. Mat. 1939, 26, 1–9. [Google Scholar]
- Bukhgejm, A.L. Introduction to the Theory of Inverse Problems; VSP: Utrecht, The Netherlands, 2000. [Google Scholar]
- Huang, X.; Imanuvilov, O.; Yamamoto, M. Stability for inverse source problems by Carleman estimates. Inverse Probl. 2020, 36, 125006. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Isakov, V. Inverse Source Problems; American Mathematical Society: Providence, RI, USA, 1990. [Google Scholar]
- Klibanov, M.V. Inverse Problems in the “large” and Carleman estimates. Differ. Uravn. 1984, 20, 1035–1041. (In Russian) [Google Scholar]
- Klibanov, M.V. A class of inverse problems for nonlinear parabolic equations. Siberian Math. J. 1987, 27, 698–707. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Klibanov, M.V. Inverse problems and Carleman estimates. Inverse Probl. 1992, 8, 575–596. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Klibanov, M.V. Carleman estimates for global uniqueness, stability and numerical methods for coefficient inverse problems. J. Inverse-Ill Posed Probl. 2013, 21, 477–560. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Klibanov, M.V.; Li, J. Inverse Problems and Carleman Estimates: Global Uniqueness, Global Convergence and Experimental Data; De Gruyter: Berlin, Germany, 2021. [Google Scholar]
- Imanuvilov, O.Y.; Yamamoto, M. Lipschitz stability in inverse parabolic problems by the Carleman estimate. Inverse Probl. 1998, 14, 1229–1245. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Yamamoto, M. Carleman estimates for parabolic equations and applications. Inverse Probl. 2009, 25, 123013. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Yuan, G.; Yamamoto, M. Lipschitz stability in the determination of the principal part of a parabolic equation. ESAIM Control Optim. Calc. Var. 2009, 15, 525–554. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Maz’ja, V.G. Sobolev Spaces. Springer Series in Soviet Mathematics; Shaposhnikova, T.O., Translator; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 1985. [Google Scholar]
Disclaimer/Publisher’s Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content. |
© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).