On mixed and transverse ray transforms on orientable surfaces

Abstract: The geodesic ray transform, the mixed ray transform and the transverse ray transform of a tensor field on a manifold can all be seen as what we call mixing ray transforms, compositions of the geodesic ray transform and an invertible linear map on tensor fields. We show that the characterization of the kernel and the stability of a mixing ray transform can be reduced to the same properties of any other mixing ray transform. Our approach applies to various geometries and ray transforms, including the light ray transform. In particular, we extend studies in de Hoop--Saksala--Zhai (2019) from compact simple surfaces to orientable surfaces with solenoidally injective geodesic ray transform. Our proofs are based on algebraic arguments.