Optimal observability of the multi-dimensional wave and Schr\"odinger equations in quantum ergodic domains

We consider the wave and Schr\"odinger equations on a bounded open connected subset $\Omega$ of a Riemannian manifold, with Dirichlet, Neumann or Robin boundary conditions whenever its boundary is nonempty. We observe the restriction of the solutions to a measurable subset $\omega$ of $\Omega$ during a time interval [0,T] with T>0. We address the problem of the optimal location of the observation subset \omega among all possible subsets of a given measure or volume fraction. We solve it in two different situations. First, when a specific choice of the initial data is given and therefore we deal with a particular solution, we show that the problem always admits at least one solution that can be regular or of fractal type depending on the regularity of the initial data. We then introduce a relevant criterion, not depending on the initial conditions and to choose the observation set in an uniform way, independent of the data and solutions under consideration. Through spectral decompositions, this leads to a second problem which consists of maximizing a spectral functional that can be viewed as a measure of eigenfunction concentration. This spectral criterion can be interpreted in two ways: it corresponds either to a time asymptotic observability constant as the observation time interval tends to infinity, or to a randomized version of the deterministic observability inequality. Under appropriate quantum ergodicity assumptions on $\Omega$, we compute the optimal value. We then provide spectral approximations and present some numerical simulations that fully confirm the theoretical results in the paper and support our conjectures. Our results highlight precise connections between optimal observability issues and quantum ergodic properties of the domain under consideration.