Control and Inverse Problems for Differential Equations on Graphs

Series
Applied and Computational Mathematics Seminar
Time
Monday, September 10, 2018 - 1:55pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Sergei Avdonin – University of Alaska Fairbanks – s.avdonin@alaska.eduhttps://www.uaf.edu/dms/avdonin/
Organizer
Wenjing Liao

Quantum graphs are metric graphs with differential equations defined on the edges. Recent interest in control and inverse problems for quantum graphs
is motivated by applications to important problems of classical and quantum physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering.

In this talk we describe some new controllability and identifability results for partial differential equations on compact graphs. In particular, we consider graph-like networks of inhomogeneous strings with masses attached at the interior vertices. We show that the wave transmitted through a mass is more
regular than the incoming wave. Therefore, the regularity of the solution to the initial boundary value problem on an edge depends on the combinatorial distance of this edge from the source, that makes control and inverse problems
for such systems more diffcult.

We prove the exact controllability of the systems with the optimal number of controls and propose an algorithm recovering the unknown densities of thestrings, lengths of the edges, attached masses, and the topology of the graph. The proofs are based on the boundary control and leaf peeling methods developed in our previous papers. The boundary control method is a powerful
method in inverse theory which uses deep connections between controllability and identifability of distributed parameter systems and lends itself to straight-forward algorithmic implementations.