Scattering of homogeneous and inhomogeneous seismic waves in low-loss viscoelastic media

Motivated by the need to derive and characterize increasingly sophisticated seismic data analysis and inversion methods incorporating wave dissipation, we consider the problem of scattering of homogeneous and inhomogeneous waves from perturbations in five viscoelastic parameters (density, P- and S-wave velocities, and P- and S-wave quality factors), as formulated in the context of the Born approximation. Within this approximation the total wave field is the superposition of an incident plane wave and a scattered wave, the latter being a spherical wave weighted by a function of solid angle called the scattering potential. In elastic media the scattering potential is real, but if dissipation is included through a viscoelastic model, the potential becomes complex and thus impacts the amplitude and phase of the outgoing wave. The isotropic-elastic scattering framework of Stolt and Weglein, extended to admit viscoelastic media, exposes these amplitude and phase phenomena to study, and in particular allows certain well-known layered-medium viscoelastic results due to Borcherdt to be re-considered in an arbitrary heterogeneous Earth. The main theoretical challenge in doing this involves the choice of coordinate system over which to evaluate and analyse the waves, which in the viscoelastic case must be based on complex vector analysis. We present a candidate system within which several of Borcherdt's key results carry over; for instance, we show that elliptically polarized P and SI waves cannot be scattered into linearly polarized SII waves. Furthermore, the elastic formulation is straightforwardly recovered in the limit as P- and S-wave quality factors tend to infinity.