A new inversion scheme for elastic diffraction tomography

Abstract: We consider the problem of elastic diffraction tomography, which consists in reconstructing elastic properties (i.e. mass density and elastic Lam\'e parameters) of a weakly scattering medium from full-field data of scattered waves outside the medium. Elastic diffraction tomography refers to the elastic inverse scattering problem after linearization using a firstorder Born approximation. In this paper, we prove the Fourier diffraction theorem, which relates the 2D Fourier transform of scattered waves with the Fourier transform of the scatterer in the 3D spatial Fourier domain. Elastic wave mode separation is performed, which decomposes a wave into four modes. A new two-step inversion process is developed, providing information on the modes first and secondly on the elastic parameters. Finally, we discuss reconstructions with plane wave excitation experiments for different tomographic setups and with different plane wave excitation frequencies, respectively.