Required source distribution for interferometry of waves and diffusive fields

SUMMARY The Green's function that describes wave propagation between two receivers can be reconstructed by cross‐correlation provided that the receivers are surrounded by sources on a closed surface. This technique is referred to as ‘interferometry’ in exploration seismology. The same technique for Green's function extraction can be applied to the solution of the diffusion equation if there are sources throughout in the volume. In practice, we have only a finite number of active sources. The issues of the required source distribution is investigated, as is the feasibility of reconstructing the Green's function of the diffusion equation using a limited number of sources within a finite volume. We study these questions for homogeneous and heterogeneous media for wave propagation and homogeneous media for diffusion using numerical simulations. These simulations show that for the used model, the angular distribution of sources is critical in wave problems in homogeneous media. In heterogeneous media, the position and size of the heterogeneous area with respect to the sources determine the required source distribution. For diffusion, the sensitivity to the sources decays from the midpoint between the two receivers. The required width of the source distribution decreases with frequency, with the result that the required source distribution for early‐ and late‐time reconstruction is different. The derived source distribution criterion for diffusion suggests that the cross‐correlation‐based interferometry is difficult to apply in field condition.