Singular support of the scattering kernel for the Rayleigh wave in perturbed half-spaces (Q617818)

The authors of this interesting paper consider the elastic wave equation \[ \begin{aligned} \big(\rho (x)\partial_{t}^{2}-{\mathcal{A}}(x,\partial_{x})\big)u(t,x)=0 &\quad\text{in }\mathbb R\times\Omega,\\ {\mathcal{N}}(x,\partial_{x})u(t,x)=0 &\quad\text{in }\mathbb R\times\Gamma , \end{aligned} \] where \(\Omega \) is a perturbed space of the half-space \(\mathbb R_+^3\equiv \{x: x_3>0\}\) with a \(C^{\infty }\) boundary \(\Gamma \), \(u(t,x)\) is the three dimensional displacement vector, \(t\) is the time, \(x\in\Omega \) is the space, \(\rho (x)\) is the density, \({\mathcal A}u=\sum_{i,j=1}^3\partial_x(a_{ij}(x)\partial_{x_j}u)\) is an operator with coefficients \(a_{ij}(x)\) of \(3\times 3\)-matrix-valued functions, and \({\mathcal N}\) is the conormal derivative of \({\mathcal A}\) defined by \({\mathcal N}u=\sum_{i,j=1}^3\nu_i(x)a_{ij}(x)\partial_{x_j}u|_\Gamma\) (\(\nu \) is the unit outer normal vector to \(\Gamma \) at \(x\in \Gamma\)). The main problem studied here is the Rayleigh wave scattering on perturbed half-spaces in the framework of the Lax-Phillips type. Singular parts of the scattering kernel for this scattering are connected with singularities of the Rayleigh wave passing through the perturbation on the boundary. The singularities to the component for the channel of the Rayleigh wave (denoted by \(S_{RR}(s,\theta ,\omega )\)) are the main goal of the present study. They can be described by estimating the singular support of the scattering kernel on the Rayleigh wave channel. The authors explain that by the following manner. Let an incident Rayleigh wave comes from the direction \(\omega \) over a far distance and be scattered by the perturbation of the boundary. Then, \(S_{RR}(s,\theta ,\omega )\) means measurement of the scattered Rayleigh wave that goes eventually in the direction \(\theta \). Therefore, the main problem is to find where the singularities of \(S_{RR}(s,\theta ,\omega )\) appear. Another interesting result in this paper is the existence of approximate solutions for the Rayleigh wave. It turns out that some approximate solutions can be introduced for the time reversed system, and another approximate solution can be constructed to the Dirichlet boundary condition. There is a case of special interest where the wave front of the Rayleigh wave going through the perturbation becomes strictly convex near whole path corresponding to the maximal time interval. In this case, using a change of variables, the authors reduce the oscillatory integrals to the form to which the stationary phase method can be applied. Using this method the asymptotic form of \(S_{RR}(s,\theta ,\omega )\) is obtained.