The Born approximation in the three-dimensional Calderón problem

Uniqueness and reconstruction in the three-dimensional Calderón inverse conductivity problem can be reduced to the study of the inverse boundary problem for Schrödinger operators −Δ+q. We study the Born approximation of q in the ball, which amounts to studying the linearization of the inverse problem. We first analyze this approximation for real and radial potentials in any dimension d≥3. We show that this approximation satisfies a closed formula that only involves the spectrum of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map associated to −Δ+q, which is closely related to a particular moment problem. We then turn to general real and essentially bounded potentials in three dimensions and introduce the notion of averaged Born approximation, which captures the exact invariance properties of the inverse problem. We obtain explicit formulas for the averaged Born approximation in terms of the matrix elements of the Dirichlet to Neumann map in the basis of spherical harmonics. To show that the averaged Born approximation does not destroy information on the potential, we also study the high-energy behavior of the matrix elements of the Dirichlet to Neumann map.