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Abstract

We study formally determined inverse problems with passive measurements for one dimensional evolution equations where the goal is to simultaneously determine both the initial data as well as the variable coefficients in such an equation from the measurement of its solution at a fixed spatial point for a certain amount of time. This can be considered as a one-dimensional model of widely open inverse problems in photo-acoustic and thermo-acoustic tomography. We provide global uniqueness results for wave and heat equations stated on bounded or unbounded spatial intervals. Contrary to all previous related results on the subject, we do not impose any genericity assumptions on the coefficients or initial data. Our proofs are based on creating suitable links to the well understood spectral theory for 1D Schr\"odinger operators. In particular, in the more challenging case of a bounded spatial domain, our proof for the inverse problem partly relies on the following two key ingredients, namely (i) Paley-Wiener type theorems due to Kahane \cite{Kahane1957SurLF} and Remling \cite{Remling2002SchrdingerOA} that together provide a quantifiable link between support of a compactly supported function and the upper density of its vanishing Schr\"odinger spectral modes and (ii) a result of Gesztesy and Simon \cite{Gesztesy1999InverseSA} on partial data inverse spectral problems for reconstructing an unknown potential in a 1D Schr\"odinger operator from the knowledge of only a fraction of its spectrum.