Outgoing solutions and radiation boundary conditions for the ideal atmospheric scalar wave equation in helioseismology

Abstract

In this paper, we study the time-harmonic scalar equation describing the propagation of acoustic waves in the Sun’s atmosphere under ideal atmospheric assumptions. We use the Liouville change of unknown to conjugate the original problem to a Schrödinger equation with a Coulomb-type potential. This transformation makes appear a new wavenumber, k, and the link with the Whittaker’s equation. We consider two different problems: in the first one, with the ideal atmospheric assumptions extended to the whole space, we construct explicitly the Schwartz kernel of the resolvent, starting from a solution given by Hostler and Pratt in punctured domains, and use this to construct outgoing solutions and radiation conditions. In the second problem, we construct exact Dirichlet-to-Neumann map using Whittaker functions, and new radiation boundary conditions (RBC), using gauge functions in terms of k. The new approach gives rise to simpler RBC for the same precision compared to existing ones. The robustness of our new RBC is corroborated by numerical experiments.