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Section: Research Program
Introduction
Probing the invisible is a quest that is shared by a wide variety of scientists such as archaeologists, geologists, astrophysicists, physicists, etc... Magique-3D is involved in Geophysical imaging which aims at understanding the internal structure of the Earth from the propagation of waves. Both qualitative and quantitative information are required and two geophysical techniques can be used: seismic reflection and seismic inversion. Seismic reflection provides a qualitative description of the subsurface from reflected seismic waves by indicating the position of the reflectors while seismic inversion transforms seismic reflection data into a quantitative description of the subsurface. Both techniques are inverse problems based upon the numerical solution of wave equations. Oil and Gas explorations have been pioneering application domains for seismic reflection and inversion and even if numerical seismic imaging is computationally intensive, oil companies promote the use of numerical simulations to provide synthetic maps of the subsurface. This is due to the tremendous progresses of scientific computing which have pushed the limits of existing numerical methods and it is now conceivable to tackle realistic 3D problems. However, mathematical wave modeling has to be well-adapted to the region of interest and the numerical schemes which are employed to solve wave equations have to be both accurate and scalable enough to take full advantage of parallel computing. Today, geophysical imaging tackles more and more realistic problems and we can contribute to this task by improving the modeling and by deriving advanced numerical methods for solving wave problems.
Magique-3D proposes to organize its research around three main axes:
These three research fields will be developed with the main objective of solving inverse problems dedicated to geophysical imaging.