Recovery of high frequency wave fields from phase space based measurements

Abstract

Computation of high frequency solutions to wave equations is important in many applications, and notoriously difficult in resolving wave oscillations. Gaussian beams are asymptotically valid high frequency solutions concentrated on a single curve through the physical domain, and superposition of Gaussian beams provides a powerful tool to generate more general high frequency solutions to PDEs. An alternative way to compute Gaussian beam components such as phase, amplitude and Hessian of the phase, is to capture them in phase space by solving Liouville type equations on uniform grids. In this work we review and extend recent constructions of asymptotic high frequency wave fields from computations in phase space. We give a new level set method of computing the Hessian and higher derivatives of the phase. Moreover, we prove that the $k^{th}$ order phase space based Gaussian beam superposition converges to the original wave field in $L^2$ at the rate of $\ep^{\frac{k}{2}-\frac{n}{4}}$ in dimension $n$.