Fast Huygens’ sweeping methods for multiarrival Green’s functions of Helmholtz equations in the high-frequency regime

Abstract

Multiarrival Green’s functions are essential in seismic modeling, migration, and inversion. Huygens-Kirchhoff (HK) integrals provide a bridge to integrate locally valid first-arrival Green’s functions into a globally valid multiarrival Green’s function. We have designed robust and accurate finite-difference methods to compute first-arrival traveltimes and amplitudes, so that first-arrival Green’s functions can be constructed rapidly. We adapted a fast butterfly algorithm to evaluate discretized HK integrals. The resulting fast Huygens’ sweeping method has the following unique features: (1) it precomputes a set of local traveltime and amplitude tables, (2) it automatically takes care of caustics, (3) it constructs Green’s functions of the Helmholtz equation for arbitrary frequencies and for many point sources, and (4) for a fixed number of points per wavelength, it constructs each Green’s function in nearly optimal complexity [Formula: see text] in terms of the total number of mesh points [Formula: see text], where the prefactor of the complexity only depends on the specified accuracy, and is independent of the frequency. The 2D and 3D examples revealed the performance of the method.