Discussion of the paper by M. Choulli and P. Stefanov: "Reconstruction of the coefficients of the stationary transport equation from boundary measurements", Osaka J. Math 36(1)(1998), 87-104

Ian Langmore
University of Washington

Date: April 19, 2006

We study the inverse problem of recovering the absorption coefficient $\sigma _a (x, \vert v\vert)$ and the collision kernel $k(x, v', v)$ in the stationary linear Boltzmann equation in a bounded domain from the albedo operator on the boundary. We show that under some conditions on the coefficients that guarantee well-posedness of the direct problem, the inverse problem has a unique solution. Moreover, we provide explicit formulae for recovering $\sigma_a$, $k$.