An Effective Fractional Paraxial Wave Equation for Wave-Fronts in Randomly Layered Media with Long-Range Correlations

This work concerns the asymptotic analysis of high-frequency wave propagation in randomly layered media with fast variations and long-range correlations. The analysis takes place in the three-dimensional physical space and weak-coupling regime. The role played by the slow decay of the correlations on a propagating pulse is twofold. First we observe a random travel time characterized by a fractional Brownian motion that appears to have a standard deviation larger than the pulse width, which is in contrast with the standard O’Doherty–Anstey theory for random propagation media with mixing properties. Second, a deterministic pulse deformation is described as the solution of a paraxial wave equation involving a pseudodifferential operator. This operator is characterized by the autocorrelation function of the medium fluctuations. In case of fluctuations with long-range correlations this operator is close to a fractional Weyl derivative whose order, between 2 and 3, depends on the power decay of the autocorrelation function. In the frequency domain, the pseudodifferential operator exhibits a frequency-dependent power-law attenuation with exponent corresponding to the order of the fractional derivative, and a frequency-dependent phase modulation, both ensuring the causality of the limiting paraxial wave equation as well as the Kramers–Kronig relations. The mathematical analysis is based on an approximation-diffusion theorem for random ordinary differential equations with long-range correlations.