Approximate controllability of a bilinear wave equation and minimum time
Abstract
We study the global approximate controllability (GAC) of a Klein-Gordon wave equation, posed on the torus of arbitrary dimension , with bilinear control potentials supported on the first -Fourier modes. Let be the set of essential zeroes of the initial state , and be the maximum radius of a ball of contained in . Due to finite speed of propagation, the minimum control time starting from is necessarily larger than or equal to . We prove the following three facts. In low dimensions : the minimum time for GAC from is equal to . In any dimensions : the minimum time for GAC from is zero if has zero Lebesgue measure; and the GAC in sufficiently large time from all . The proof strategy consists in combining Lie bracket techniques \emph{\`a la Agrachev-Sarychev} with the propagation of well-prepared positive states.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.19544,
title = {Approximate controllability of a bilinear wave equation and minimum time},
author = {Karine Beauchard and Thomas Perrin and Eugenio Pozzoli},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.19544},
year = {2026}
}