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Inverse Autoconvolution Problems with an Application in Laser Physics

Convolution and, as a special case, autoconvolution of functions are important in many branches of mathematics and have found lots of applications, such as in physics, statistics, image processing and others. While it is a relatively easy task to determine the autoconvolution of a function (at least from the numerical point of view), the inverse problem, which consists in reconstructing a function from its autoconvolution is an ill-posed problem. Hence there is no possibility to solve such an inverse autoconvolution problem with a simple algebraic operation. Instead the problem has to be regularized, which means that it is replaced by a well-posed problem, which is close to the original problem in a certain sense.
The outline of this thesis is as follows:
In the first chapter we give an introduction to the type of inverse problems we consider, including some basic definitions and some important examples of regularization methods for these problems. At the end of the introduction we shortly present some general results about the convergence theory of Tikhonov-regularization.
The second chapter is concerned with the autoconvolution of square integrable functions defined on the interval [0, 1]. This will lead us to the classical autoconvolution problems, where the term “classical” means that no kernel function is involved in the autoconvolution operator. For the data situation we distinguish two cases, namely data on [0, 1] and data on [0, 2]. We present some well-known properties of the classical autoconvolution operators. Moreover, we investigate nonlinearity conditions, which are required to show applicability of certain regularization approaches or which lead convergence rates for the Tikhonov regularization. For the inverse autoconvolution problem with data on the interval [0, 1] we show that a convergence rate cannot be shown using the standard convergence rate theory. If the data are given on the interval [0, 2], we can show a convergence rate for Tikhonov regularization if the exact solution satisfies a sparsity assumption. After these theoretical investigations we present various approaches to solve inverse autoconvolution problems. Here we focus on a discretized Lavrentiev regularization approach, for which even a convergence rate can be shown. Finally, we present numerical examples for the regularization methods we presented.
In the third chapter we describe a physical measurement technique, the so-called SD-Spider, which leads to an inverse problem of autoconvolution type. The SD-Spider method is an approach to measure ultrashort laser pulses (laser pulses with time duration in the range of femtoseconds). Therefor we first present some very basic concepts of nonlinear optics and after that we describe the method in detail. Then we show how this approach, starting from the wave equation, leads to a kernel-based equation of autoconvolution type.
The aim of chapter four is to investigate the equation and the corresponding problem, which we derived in chapter three. As a generalization of the classical autoconvolution we define the kernel-based autoconvolution operator and show that many properties of the classical autoconvolution operator can also be shown in this new situation. Moreover, we will consider inverse problems with kernel-based autoconvolution operator, which reflect the data situation of the physical problem. It turns out that these inverse problems may be locally well-posed, if all possible data are taken into account and they are locally ill-posed if one special part of the data is not available. Finally, we introduce reconstruction approaches for solving these inverse problems numerically and test them on real and artificial data.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa.de:bsz:ch1-qucosa-211850
Date21 October 2016
CreatorsBürger, Steven
ContributorsTechnische Universität Chemnitz, Fakultät für Mathematik, Prof. Dr. Bernd Hofmann, Prof. Dr. Bernd Hofmann, Dr. Peter Mathé, Prof. Dr. Lothar Reichel
PublisherUniversitätsbibliothek Chemnitz
Source SetsHochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typedoc-type:doctoralThesis
Formatapplication/pdf, text/plain, application/zip

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