Layer Stripping for a Transversely Isotropic Elastic Medium (Q4258488)

In this paper an inverse boundary value problem of 3D elasticity is considered and a layer stripping algorithm is developed to solve it. Let \(\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^3\) be a bounded domain with a smooth boundary \(\partial\Omega\). \(\Omega\) is considered as a linear inhomogeneous locally transversely isotropic elastic body. The deformation of \(\Omega\) due to the surface displacement \(f\in C^\infty(\partial\Omega)\) given on \(\partial\Omega\) is solution to the following Dirichlet boundary value problem: \[ \text{div }\sigma(u)=0\quad\text{in}\quad \Omega,\quad u=f\quad\text{on}\quad \partial\Omega. \] Here, \(u\) is the displacement vector, \(\sigma\) is the stress tensor \[ \sigma=C(x)\varepsilon,\quad \varepsilon=\tfrac 12(u\nabla+\nabla u), \] \(C=C(x)\) is the elastic tensor. The map \[ \Lambda:C^\infty(\partial\Omega)\ni f\to\Lambda(f)\in C^\infty(\partial\Omega) \] is called the Dirichlet to Neumann (DN) map, where \[ \Lambda(f)=\sigma(u)\nu|_{\partial\Omega}=\left(\sum^3_{j=1}\sigma_{ij}\nu_j\right)_{1\leq i\leq 3}. \] Here \(\nu=(\nu_1,\nu_2,\nu_3)\) is the outer unit normal vector to \(\partial\Omega\). The paper answers the following question: Can the elastic tensor \(C(x)\) in \(\overline{\Omega}\) be determined from the DN map? The authors show that the surface impedance tensor is essentially the principal symbol of DN map for general anisotropic elastic materials. A pseudodifferential operator of order 1 is introduced and the presented layer stripping algorithm is based on the fact that the defined pseudodifferential operator satisfies the Riccati equation.