Arrival Times for the Wave Equation

We establish a definition of arrival time of a wavefront for a propagating wave in anisotropic media that is initially at rest and where the governing partial differential equation is the anisotropic wave equation. This definition of arrival time is not the same as the one in [8, 12]; it eliminates pathological discontinuities that can occur with the older definition and is still consistent with physical intuition. What is substantively new here is that we show that the newly defined arrival time is locally Lipschitz-continuous. Then following the method in [8, 12] we establish that it satisfies the eikonal equation. Furthermore, in the isotropic case we establish that the arrival time, as defined here, is the unique viscosity solution of the eikonal equation. Our motivation for this work is to use this arrival time at points in the interior of a physical or biological material, which is estimated from displacement measurements, to determine properties of the medium that are represented as functions in the eikonal equation; see [8, 10, 11, 12]. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.