Applications of Quantum Chaos Concepts to Long Range Ocean Acoustics

The long-term goals are 1 to take advantage of the ever-changing ocean environments effects in order to provide a more complete understanding of long-range acoustic pulse propagation, 2 to understand the extent of fundamental limitations on ray-based acoustic tomography of particular interest is the breakdown range of semiclassical methods, 3 to develop the theory of the statistical fluctuations of the wavefield, and 4 to address important basic physics issues that arise in the ocean problem, but within a more general wave propagation in random media context. There are three primary scientific objectives of this work 1 to begin developing a geometric acoustics theory that addresses parametrically varying ocean environments in the presence of raychaos, determines what information survives under such conditions, and determines how to extract it, 2 to develop the geometric acoustics theory of wavefield fluctuations, and 3 to determine the sensitivity of acoustic waveelds to relevant ocean environment parameters thereby connecting the scale of changes in the ocean to range scales of wavefield correlation decay.