Physics Commons^™

Time Reversal Of Continuous-Wave, Steady-State Signals In Elastic Media, Brian E. Anderson, Robert A. Guyer, Paul A. Johnson, Timothy J. Ulrich

Faculty Publications

Experimental observations of spatial focusing of continuous-wave, steady-state elastic waves in a reverberant elastic cavity using time reversal are reported here. Spatially localized focusing is achieved when multiple channels are employed, while a single channel does not yield such focusing. The amplitude of the energy at the focal location increases as the square of the number of channels used, while the amplitude elsewhere in the medium increases proportionally with the number of channels used. The observation is important in the context of imaging in solid laboratory samples as well as problems involving continuous-wave signals in Earth.