Section: Application Domains

Inverse problems

We focus on methods related to the blend of time reversal techniques and absorbing boundary conditions (ABC) used in a non standard way. Since the seminal paper by [M. Fink et al., Imaging through inhomogeneous media using time reversal mirrors. Ultrasonic Imaging, 13(2):199, 1991.], time reversal is a subject of very active research. The principle is to back-propagate signals to the sources that emitted them. The initial experiment was to refocus, very precisely, a recorded signal after passing through a barrier consisting of randomly distributed metal rods. In [de Rosny and Fink. Overcoming the difraction limit in wave physics using a time-reversal mirror and a novel acoustic sink. Phys. Rev. Lett., 89 (12), 2002], the source that created the signal is time reversed in order to have a perfect time reversal experiment. In [41], we improve this result from a numerical point of view by showing that it can be done numerically without knowing the source. This is done at the expense of not being able to recover the signal in the vicinity of the source. In [42], time dependent wave splitting is performed using ABC and time reversal techniques. We now work on extending these methods to non uniform media.

All our numerical simulations are performed in FreeFem++ which is very flexible. As a byproduct, it enables us to have an end user point of view with respect to FreeFem++ which is very useful for improving it.