Abstract

This paper is inspired by an imaging problem encountered in the framework of Electrical Resistance Tomography involving two different materials, one or both of which are nonlinear. Tomography with nonlinear materials is in the early stages of development, although breakthroughs are expected in the not-too-distant future. We consider nonlinear constitutive relationships which, at a given point in the space, present a behavior for large arguments that is described by monomials of order p and q. The original contribution this work makes is that the nonlinear problem can be approximated by a weighted p-Laplace problem. From the perspective of tomography, this is a significant result because it highlights the central role played by the p-Laplacian in inverse problems with nonlinear materials. Moreover, when p = 2, this provides a powerful bridge to bring all the imaging methods and algorithms developed for linear materials into the arena of problems with nonlinear materials. The main result of this work is that for ``large"" Dirichlet data in the presence of two materials of different order (i) one material can be replaced by either a perfect electric conductor or a perfect electric insulator and (ii) the other material can be replaced by a material giving rise to a weighted p-Laplace problem.