Inverse initial data for nonlinear Schrödinger equation via Carleman estimates and the contraction principle
This work provides a novel theoretical and numerical framework for initial data reconstruction in nonlinear Schrödinger equations, which is relevant for applications in optics, quantum mechanics, and plasma physics.
The paper tackles the inverse problem of reconstructing the initial wave field of a nonlinear Schrödinger equation from lateral boundary measurements. The proposed method accurately recovers the main features of the initial field and remains stable under noisy data, as demonstrated in 2D numerical experiments.
We study an inverse initial-data problem for a nonlinear Schrödinger equation in which the initial wave field is reconstructed from lateral measurements. Our approach combines a Legendre-polynomial-exponential-time dimensional reduction with a Carleman-based contraction principle. First, we expand the solution in a weighted Legendre basis in time and truncate the expansion to obtain a coupled nonlinear elliptic system for the spatial coefficients. Next, we solve this reduced system by constructing a contraction map on a suitable admissible set. This contraction map admits a unique fixed point, which is the limit of the corresponding Picard iteration. We also establish a stability estimate showing that this fixed point remains close to the exact reduced solution in the noisy-data case. Finally, we present numerical experiments in two space dimensions for several different geometries and nonlinear exponents. The numerical results show that the proposed method accurately reconstructs the main features of the initial wave field and remains stable even when the boundary data contain noise.