English

Gel'fand's inverse problem under Ricci curvature bounds

Differential Geometry 2026-02-17 v1 Analysis of PDEs Metric Geometry

Abstract

The classical Gel'fand's inverse problem asks whether a Riemannian manifold is uniquely determined by the knowledge of the heat kernel on any open subset of the manifold. We study this inverse problem in the non-smooth setting in the framework of RCD(K,N){\rm RCD}(K,N) spaces, namely, metric-measure spaces with synthetic Riemannian Ricci curvature bounded below by KK and dimension bounded above by NN. We establish the unique solvability of Gel'fand's inverse problem for the class of compact RCD(K,N){\rm RCD}(K,N) spaces whose regular set admits C1C^1-Riemannian structure. As an application, we obtain the stability of Gel'fand's inverse problem in the class of closed Riemannian manifolds with bounded Ricci curvature, diameter and volume bounded from below. We note that the results are new even for Einstein orbifolds and (weighted) Riemannian manifolds with non-smooth boundary.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.14527,
  title  = {Gel'fand's inverse problem under Ricci curvature bounds},
  author = {Shouhei Honda and Jinpeng Lu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.14527},
  year   = {2026}
}