Determining a nonlinear hyperbolic system with unknown sources and nonlinearity

This paper is devoted to some inverse boundary problems associated with a time-dependent semilinear hyperbolic equation, where both nonlinearity and sources (including initial displacement and initial velocity) are unknown. It is shown in several generic scenarios that one can uniquely determine the nonlinearity and/or the sources by using passive or active boundary observations. In order to exploit the nonlinearity and the sources simultaneously, we develop a new technique, which combines the observability for linear wave equations and an approximation property with higher order linearization for the semilinear hyperbolic equation. © 2024 The Authors. The publishing rights in this article are licensed to the London Mathematical Society under an exclusive licence.