On the Wave of Klein-Gordon Type: Propagation Equation at a Boundary and Interior Observability

Abstract

Understanding the transport of semiclassical measures along generalized bicharacteristics is a key ingredient in the proof of observability for the wave equation. Here, the coefficients are only assumed to be of class $C^1$, which is a limit case for the existence of bicharacteristics. We consider boundary conditions of the form ${\partial }_{\nu }u+i{\partial }_{t}u=0$, as a first step towards more general Lopatinskii-type conditions. We derive the transport equation satisfied by the measure arising from the concentration of high-frequency waves that obstruct observability. Observability of solutions associated with positive time-frequencies is then obtained by contradiction under the geometrical control condition.