Spatio-temporal invariants of the time reversal operator.

The decomposition of the time reversal operator, known by the French acronym DORT, is a technique to extract point scatterers' monochromatic Green's functions from a medium. It is used to detect, locate, and focus on scatterers in various domains such as underwater acoustics, medical ultrasound, and nondestructive evaluation. A limitation of the method arises from its single-frequency nature, when the signals used in acoustics are often broadband. Reconstruction of the broadband Green's functions from the single-frequency Green's functions can be very difficult when numerous scatterers are present in the medium. Moreover, the method does not take advantage of the axial resolution associated with broadband signals. Time domain methods are investigated here as an answer to these problems. It is shown that the time reversal operator in the time domain takes the form of a tensor. The properties of the invariants are discussed. It is shown they do not have all the expected properties. Another method is proposed that requires a priori information on the medium.