Determination of a time‐ and space‐dependent heat flux relaxation function by means of a restricted Dirichlet‐to‐Neumann operator

We consider an inverse problem to recover a space‐ and time‐dependent relaxation function of heat flux in a three‐dimensional body on the basis of the restriction of the Dirichlet‐to‐Neumann operator of the related equation of heat flow onto a set of Dirichlet data of the form of a product of a fixed time‐dependent coefficient and a free space‐dependent function. Uniqueness of the solution of this inverse problem is proved. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.