Non-contacting characterization of the electrical and mechanical properties of rocks at submillimeter scales

Abstract

At the meso and macro-scale, the connection between the elastic and the electromagnetic properties of granular materials such as rocks is complicated and involves, among other things, the chemical, mineralogical, and geometric features of the grains and their host medium. In the previous work, we showed how to perform rapid near-field millimeter wave scanning to obtain high-spatial resolution maps of the spatially varying dielectric permittivity of heterogeneous materials, including rocks. Here, we extend this concept to laser ultrasound and map the spatially varying mechanical properties of materials with similar resolution.