A note on dynamic ray tracing in ray-centered coordinates in anisotropic inhomogeneous media

Vlastislav Cerveny

Summary

Dynamic ray tracing plays an important role in paraxial ray methods. In this paper, dynamic ray tracing systems for inhomogeneous anisotropic media, consisting of four linear ordinary differential equations of the first order along the reference ray, are studied. The main attention is devoted to systems expressed in a particularly simple choice of ray-centered coordinates, here referred to as the standard ray-centered coordinates, and in wavefront orthonormal coordinates. These two systems, known from the literature, were derived independently and were given in different forms. In this paper it is proved that both systems are fully equivalent. Consequently, the dynamic ray tracing system, consisting of four equations in wavefront orthonormal coordinates, can also be used if we work in ray-centered coordinates, and vice versa.

Keywords

Dynamic ray tracing, inhomogeneous anisotropic media, ray-centered coordinates, wavefront orthonormal coordinates.

Whole paper

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Stud. geophys. geod., 51 (2007), 411-422.
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