Decoupling elastic waves and its applications

Abstract

In this paper, we consider time-harmonic elastic wave scattering governed by the Lamé system. It is known that the elastic wave field can be decomposed into the shear and compressional parts, namely, the pressure and shear waves that are generally coexisting, but propagating at different speeds. We consider the third or fourth kind impenetrable scatterer and derive two geometric conditions, respectively, related to the mean and Gaussian curvatures of the boundary surface of the scatterer that can ensure the decoupling of the shear and pressure waves. The decoupling results are new to the literature and are of significant interest for their own sake. As an interesting application, we apply the decoupling results to the uniqueness and stability analysis for inverse elastic scattering problems in determining polyhedral scatterers by a minimal number of far-field measurements.