Finger-printing Diffractors Encountered by Multiply-scattered Waves

We present a model-independent method to ‘finger-print’ or tag individual scatterers (diffractors) inside an acoustic medium using move-outs of interrogative wave energy across source and receiver arrays. For any observed multiply-scattered wave the set of such finger-prints is sufficient information to identify the ordered diffraction path of any recorded wave arrival (i.e., including the sequential order in which each scatterer was encountered). A synthetic example shows that the method is capable of disentangling up to 4th order scattering events into their irreducible single-scattering components. This contributes to proper interpretation of (multiply) diffracted energy.