Model experiments on acoustic tomography of the nonlinear parameter

It is shown experimentally that the scattering of sound by sound can be observed outside the region of interaction between primary waves and that it carries information on the spatial distribution of the scatterer’s nonlinear characteristics. Based on this effect, a simple method for reconstructing the distribution of the nonlinear parameter by using complex-modulated broadband primary signals and a small number of transmit and receive transducers is implemented. The possibility of reconstructing a two-dimensional distribution of a nonlinear parameter inhomogeneity with the use of only three transducers (two transmitters and one receiver) without additional scanning in the aspect angle is demonstrated. This simple scheme loses information on the low-frequency components of the scatterer’s spatial spectrum and reconstructs the distribution of only the spatial variations of the nonlinear parameter.