Absorbing Layer via Wave-Equation Splitting

Abstract

Modeling acoustic waves generated by a localized source is always vexed by the nagging problem of spurious reflections and wraparound arising when the wavefront reaches the boundary of the numerical mesh. This difficulty may be circumvented by using a very large computational domain, which is very inefficient, or can be tackled by using some kind of absorbing boundary technique, which has not yet found a universally satisfactory solution. In this work, the wave equation is modified by introducing a term that is nonzero only in a narrow strip near the boundary. Then, a splitting technique permits to compute part of the solution analytically (hence, at no computational cost), while an application of Weyl's formula for the exponential of a matrix leads to a second-order accurate scheme that completes the algorithm. An application to SH seismic wave modeling shows that the performance of the present method is competitive with standard ones. Moreover, there is evidence for a potential application to the modeling of wave propagation in porous media, where stiff differential equations arise.