On an inverse problem of nonlinear imaging with fractional damping

Abstract: This paper considers the attenuated Westervelt equation in pressure formulation. The attenuation is by various models proposed in the literature and characterised by the inclusion of non-local operators that give power law damping as opposed to the exponential of classical models. The goal is the inverse problem of recovering a spatially dependent coefficient in the equation, the parameter of nonlinearity $\kappa(x)$, in what becomes a nonlinear hyperbolic equation with nonlocal terms. The overposed measured data is a time trace taken on a subset of the domain or its boundary. We shall show injectivity of the linearised map from $\kappa$ to the overposed data used to recover it and from this basis develop and analyse Newton-type schemes for its effective recovery.