The elastic ray transform
Abstract
We introduce and study a new family of tensor tomography problems. At rank 2 it corresponds to linearization of travel time of elastic waves, measured for all polarizations. We provide a kernel characterization for ranks up to 2. The kernels consist of potential tensors, but in an unusual sense: the associated differential operators have degree 2 instead of the familiar 1. The proofs are based on Fourier analysis, Helmholtz decompositions, and cohomology.
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