Inversion for weak triclinic anisotropy from acoustic axes

Abstract

Acoustic axes are directions in anisotropic elastic media, in which phase velocities of two or three plane waves (P, S1 or S2 waves) coincide. Acoustic axes are important, because they can cause singularities in the field of polarization vectors and anomalies in the shape of the slowness surface. The maximum number of acoustic axes in triclinic anisotropy is 16, and their directions depend on anisotropy parameters in a complicate way. Under weak anisotropy approximation this dependence simplifies and the directions of acoustic axes can be used for the inversion for anisotropy parameters. The maximum acoustic axes under weak anisotropy is 16, the minimum number of acoustic axes is zero. In the inversion, we can retrieve 13 combinations of anisotropy parameters provided we use directions of 7 acoustic axes at least. Under weak anisotropy approximation, the directions of acoustic axes are insensitive to strength of anisotropy; hence we cannot invert for absolute values of weak anisotropy parameters, but only for their relative values. Numerical tests have shown that the inversion is applicable only to very weak anisotropy with strength of less than 5%, provided that the acoustic axes used in the inversion are determined with an accuracy of 0.1∘ or better. In this case the inversion yields an average error for elastic parameters of less than 10%. In order to invert for the total set of 21 anisotropy parameters it is necessary to combine the measurements of the directions of the acoustic axes with measurements of other attributes of elastic waves in anisotropic media.