Some inverse problems arising from elastic scattering by rigid obstacles

Abstract

In the first part, it is proved that a C2-regular rigid scatterer in R3 can be uniquely identified by the shear part (i.e. S-part) of the far-field pattern corresponding to all incident shear waves at any fixed frequency. The proof is short and it is based on a kind of decoupling of the S-part of scattered wave from its pressure part (i.e. P-part) on the boundary of the scatterer. Moreover, uniqueness using the S-part of the far-field pattern corresponding to only one incident plane shear wave holds for a ball or a convex Lipschitz polyhedron. In the second part, we adapt the factorization method to recover the shape of a rigid body from the scattered S-waves (resp. P-waves) corresponding to all incident plane shear (resp. pressure) waves. Numerical examples illustrate the accuracy of our reconstruction in R2. In particular, the factorization method also leads to some uniqueness results for all frequencies excluding possibly a discrete set.