Helmholtz decomposition with a scalar Poisson equation in elastic anisotropic media

Abstract

P- and S-wave separation plays an important role in elastic reverse-time migration. It can reduce the artifacts caused by crosstalk between different modes and improve image quality. In addition, P- and S-wave separation can also be used to better understand and distinguish wave types in complex media. At present, the methods for separating wave modes in anisotropic media mainly include spatial non-stationary filtering, low-rank approximation, and vector Poisson equation. Most of these methods require multiple Fourier transforms or the calculation of large matrices, which require high computational costs for problems with large scale. In this paper, an efficient method is proposed to separate the wave mode for anisotropic media by using a scalar anisotropic Poisson operator in the spatial domain. For 2D problems, the computational complexity required by this method is 1/2 of the methods based on solving a vector Poisson equation. Therefore, compared with existing methods based on pseudo-Helmholtz decomposition operators, this method can significantly reduce the computational cost. Numerical examples also show that the P and S waves decomposed by this method not only have the correct amplitude and phase relative to the input wavefield but also can reduce the computational complexity significantly.