Explicit form of relaxation tensor for isotropic extended Burgers model and its spectral inversion

Abstract

Concerning the anelastic nature of Earth, the quasi-static extended Burgers model (abbreviated by q-EBM), an integro-differential system, is used to study the free oscillation of Earth (abbreviated by FOE). In this paper, we first provide a general method to obtain an explicit form of the relaxation tensor for inhomogeneous isotropic q-EBM. Then, we apply it to compute the eigenvalues of the free oscillation of Earth, assuming that Earth is a unit ball modeled as a homogeneous and isotropic q-EBM. So far, an analytical and systematic way to compute the eigenvalues of the FOE has been missing when modeling Earth as a q-EBM. In particular, we compute some clusters of eigenvalues (abbreviated by C-ev's). To be more precise, integrating by parts with respect to time of the q-EBM under the assumption that the initial strain is zero, the q-EBM becomes the sum of two terms. The first term, called the instantaneous term, doesn't have any integration with respect to time, but the second term, called the memory term, has such an integration. Then, consider the eigenvalues of the instantaneous part of the q-EBM. The eigenfunctions of C-ev's share the same eigenfunctions of the instantaneous part. However, the C-ev's may be shifted from the eigenvalues of the instantaneous part. Further, we analyze the structure of C-ev's and provide an inversion formula identifying the q-EBM from the C-ev's.