Recentprogressontheboundaryrigidityproblem-Purdue.PDFVIP

ELECTRONIC RESEARCH ANNOUNCEMENTS OF THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY Volume 00, Pages 000–000 (Xxxx XX, XXXX) S 1079-6762(XX)0000-0 RECENT PROGRESS ON THE BOUNDARY RIGIDITY PROBLEM PLAMEN STEFANOV AND GUNTHER UHLMANN Abstract. The boundary rigidity problem consists in determining a compact, Riemannian manifold with boundary, up to isometry, by knowing the bound- ary distance function between boundary points. In this paper we announce the result of [25] that one can solve this problem for generic simple metrics. Moreover we probe stability estimates for this problem. 1. Main Results Let (M, ∂M, g) be a compact Riemannian manifold with boundary. Denote by ρg the distance function in the metric g . We consider the inverse problem of whether ρg (x, y), known for all x, y on ∂M , determines the metric uniquely. It is clear that any isometry which is the identity at the boundary will give rise to the same distance functions on the boundary. Therefore, the natural question is whether this is the only obstruction to uniqueness. This is known in differential geometry as the boundary rigidity problem. The boundary distance function only takes into account the shortest paths and it is easy to find counterexamples where ρg does not carry any information about certain open subset of M , so one needs to pose some restrictions on the metric. One such condition is simplicity of the metric. Definition 1.1. We say that the Riemannian metric g is simple in M , if ∂M is strictly convex w.r.t. g , and for any x ∈ M , the exponential map expx : exp−1(M ) →