A time-reversal method for an acoustical pulse propagating in randomly layered media

In the recent years a considerable amount of mathematical work has been devoted to the study of reflected signals obtained by the propagation of pulses in randomly layered media. We refer to [M. Asch, W. Kohler, G. Papanicolaou, M. Postel and B. White, “Frequency content of randomly scattered signals”, SIAM Review 33 (4), 519–625 (1991)] for an extensive survey and applications to inverse problems. The analysis is based on separation of scales between the correlation scale of the inhomogeneities present in the medium, the typical wavelengths of the pulse and the macroscopic variations of the medium. On the other hand, in the context of ultrasounds, time-reversal mirrors have been developed and their effects have been studied experimentally by Mathias Fink and his team at the Laboratoire Ondes et Acoustique (ESPCI-Paris). We refer to: [M. Fink, “Time reversal mirrors”, J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 26, 1333–1350 (1993)]. Our goal is to present a mathematical analysis of a time-reversal method for analyzing reflected signals in the model described in [M. Asch, W. Kohler, G. Papanicolaou, M. Postel and B. White, “Frequency content of randomly scattered signals”, SIAM Review 33(4), 519–625 (1991)]. We restrict our analysis to the one-dimensional case, the three-dimensional layered case being the content of a forthcoming paper. It is noticeable that we do not introduce new mathematics in the problem but simply put together an already existing mathematical theory and a new device, the time-reversal mirror.