The enclosure method for the heat equation

This paper shows how the enclosure method which was originally introduced for elliptic equations can be applied to inverse initial boundary value problems for parabolic equations. For the purpose a prototype of inverse initial boundary value problems whose governing equation is the heat equation is considered. An explicit method to extract an approximation of the value of the support function at a given direction of unknown discontinuity embedded in a heat conductive body from the temperature for a suitable heat flux on the lateral boundary for a fixed observation time is given.