Date of Award

5-2018

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Mathematics

Committee Chair

Maarten V. de Hoop

Committee Co-Chair

Plamen Stefanov

Committee Member 1

Kiril Datchev

Committee Member 2

Peijun Li

Abstract

In this dissertation, we consider some new techniques related to the solution of the inverse boundary value problem for the wave equation with partial boundary data. Most results are formulated in a geometric setting, where waves propagate in the interior of a smooth manifold with smooth boundary M, and the wave speed is modelled by an unknown Riemannian metric g. For data, we focus mostly on using the Neumann-to-Dirichlet (N-to-D) map with sources and receivers restricted to a measurement set Γ ⊂ ∂M. The goal of the inverse problem, in this setting, is to use these wave boundary measurements to recover the geometry of (M, g) near the measurement set. We note that this geometric perspective accomodates, as special cases, both the scalar acoustic wave equation and elliptically anisotropic wave speeds. We consider three problems. In the first problem, we provide a technique to use the N-to-D map to construct the travel times between interior points with known semi-geodesic coordinates and boundary points belonging to Γ. Such travel times can be used to reconstruct the metric in semi-geodesic coordinates using one of several existing techniques, so this procedure can be viewed as providing a data processing step for a metric reconstruction procedure. In the second problem, we consider a redatuming procedure, where we use data on the boundary and known near-boundary geometry to synthesize wave measurements in this known near-boundary region. This allows us to construct a map which plays a similar role to the N-to-D map, but for interior sources and interior measurements. Our motivation for this procedure is that it can serve as a data propagation step for a layer stripping reconstruction method, in which one first reconstructs the metric near the boundary and then propagates data into this region to serve as data for an interior reconstruction step. In the third problem, we restrict attention to the case where M is a domain in Rn, and consider two related procedures to use the N-to-D map or Dirichlet-to-Neumann (D-to-N) map to directly reconstruct the metric. In the anisotropic case, we construct the metric in semi-geodesic coordinates via reconstruction of the wave field in the interior of the domain. In the isotropic case, we can go further and construct the wave speed in the Euclidean coordinates via reconstruction of the coordinate transformation from the boundary normal coordinates to the Euclidean coordinates. In addition to providing constructive procedures, we analyze the stability of some steps from these procedures. In particular we consider the stability of the redatuming procedure and the stability of the metric reconstruction procedure from internal data (for the third problem). Moreover, we provide computational experiments to demonstrate our three main procedures.

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