Imaging reflections in elliptically anisotropic media

Abstract

In an isotropic medium, waves reflected from a mirror form a virtual image of their source. This property of planar reflectors is generally not true in the presence of anisotropy. In their short note, Blair and Korringa (1987) show that for the special case of SH waves from a point source in a transversely isotropic medium, an aberration‐free image is formed for any orientation of the mirror. While their proof is mathematical, we show the same result in an intuitive, pictorial fashion and in the process discover that although the image is indeed aberration free, it is still distorted.