Ghost Images in Helioseismic Holography? Toy Models in a Uniform Medium

TL;DR

This study compares helioseismic holography and Porter--Bojarski holography in a uniform medium, revealing that the latter can potentially improve helioseismic source localization by eliminating ghost images.

Contribution

It demonstrates that Porter--Bojarski holography can match helioseismic holography's source detection capabilities without ghost images in a simplified model.

Findings

Both methods locate the source effectively.

Helioseismic holography produces ghost images.

Porter--Bojarski holography avoids ghost images.

Abstract

Helioseismic holography is a powerful technique used to probe the solar interior based on estimations of the 3D wavefield. Porter--Bojarski holography, which is a well-established method used in acoustics to recover sources and scatterers in 3D, is also an estimation of the wavefield, and hence it has the potential to be applied to helioseismology. Here we present a proof of concept study, where we compare helioseismic holography and Porter--Bojarski holography under the assumption that the waves propagate in a homogeneous medium. We consider the problem of locating a point source of wave excitation inside a sphere. Under these assumptions, we find that the two imaging methods have the same capability of locating the source, with the exception that helioseismic holography suffers from "ghost images" (i.e., artificial peaks away from the source location). We conclude that Porter--Bojarski holography may improve the current method used in helioseismology.