Invariant distributions, Beurling transforms and tensor tomography in higher dimensions

Abstract

In the recent articles [PSU13, PSU14c], a number of tensor tomography results were proved on two-dimensional manifolds. The purpose of this paper is to extend some of these methods to manifolds of any dimension. A central concept is the surjectivity of the adjoint of the geodesic ray transform, or equivalently the existence of certain distributions that are invariant under the geodesic flow. We prove that on any Anosov manifold, one can find invariant distributions with controlled first Fourier coefficients. The proof is based on subelliptic type estimates and a Pestov identity. We present an alternative construction valid on manifolds with nonpositive curvature, based on the fact that a natural Beurling transform on such manifolds turns out to be essentially a contraction. Finally, we obtain uniqueness results in tensor tomography both on simple and Anosov manifolds that improve earlier results by assuming a condition on the terminator value for a modified Jacobi equation.