Deviated-Borehole Diffraction Tomography in the Frequency-Space Domain

Diffraction tomography is a wave equation based inversion method that, as the name implies, takes into account diffraction and scattering of waves at small-scale anomalies. The term diffraction tomography was chosen in order to contrast it with traveltime tomography which is based on ray theory and the eikonal equation. Diffraction tomographic methods were widely developed and used in optics and non-destructive testing applications. Devaney (1984) and Wu and Toksöz (1987) introduced them to the geophysical community. Since then, many investigations using diffraction tomography were carried out. Most of the work was concerned with the inversion of vertical seimic profiles or crosshole surveys.