Time-Reversed Refocusing of Surface Water Waves

A time-reversal mirror is, roughly speaking, a device which is capable of receiving a signal in time, keeping it in memory, and sending it back into the medium in the reversed direction of time. A brief mathematical review of the time-reversal (in reflection) theory is presented in the context of the linear shallow water equations. In particular, an explicit expression is given for the refocused pulse in the simplest time-reversal case. The explicit expression for the power spectral density of the reflection process is used to construct the highpass filter, which controls the refocusing process. Time-reversal numerical experiments in the (effectively) linear regime are used to validate the nonlinear shallow water code. The numerically refocused pulse is compared with the theoretical predicted shape. Further numerical experiments illustrate the robustness of the theory, in particular the time-reversal refocusing with smaller cutoff windows, the self-averaging property, and finally refocusing when the nonlinear term is small but not negligible.