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Main Authors: Holm, Sverre, Bergli, Joakim
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03341
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author Holm, Sverre
Bergli, Joakim
author_facet Holm, Sverre
Bergli, Joakim
contents Absorption of elastic waves in complex media is commonly found to increase linearly with frequency, for both longitudinal and shear waves. This ubiquitous property is observed in media such as rocks, unconsolidated sediments, and human tissue. Absorption is due to relaxation processes at the level of atomic scales and up to the sub-micron scale of biological materials. The effect of these processes is usually expressed as an integral over relaxation frequencies or relaxation times. Here we argue that these processes are thermally activated. Unusual for ultrasonics and seismics, we can therefore transform the expression for absorption from the frequency or time domains to an integral over an activation energy landscape weighted by an energy distribution. The universal power-law property surprisingly corresponds to a flat activation energy landscape. This is the solution which maximizes entropy or randomness. Therefore the linearly increasing absorption corresponds to the energy landscape with the fewest possible constraints.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_03341
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Energy landscape interpretation of universal linearly increasing absorption with frequency
Holm, Sverre
Bergli, Joakim
Soft Condensed Matter
Materials Science
Absorption of elastic waves in complex media is commonly found to increase linearly with frequency, for both longitudinal and shear waves. This ubiquitous property is observed in media such as rocks, unconsolidated sediments, and human tissue. Absorption is due to relaxation processes at the level of atomic scales and up to the sub-micron scale of biological materials. The effect of these processes is usually expressed as an integral over relaxation frequencies or relaxation times. Here we argue that these processes are thermally activated. Unusual for ultrasonics and seismics, we can therefore transform the expression for absorption from the frequency or time domains to an integral over an activation energy landscape weighted by an energy distribution. The universal power-law property surprisingly corresponds to a flat activation energy landscape. This is the solution which maximizes entropy or randomness. Therefore the linearly increasing absorption corresponds to the energy landscape with the fewest possible constraints.
title Energy landscape interpretation of universal linearly increasing absorption with frequency
topic Soft Condensed Matter
Materials Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03341