Boundary controllability in problems of transmission for a class of second order hyperbolic systems

We consider transmission problems for general second order linear hyperbolic systems having piecewise constant coefficients in a bounded, open connected set with smooth boundary and controlled through the Dirichlet boundary condition. It is proved that such a system is exactly controllable in an appropriate function space provided the interfaces where the coefficients have a jump discontinuity are all star-shaped with respect to one and the same point and the coefficients satisfy a certain monotonicity condition