Body waves in a “real Earth”. Part I

abstract A theoretical analysis of body waves in a “real Earth” is presented. The earth model consists of an arbitrary number of spherical liquid and solid layers. The algebraic part of the analysis deals with the way to obtain generalized rays out of the exact solution. It is shown that the Rayleigh matrix, and not the Rayleigh determinant, should be used to expand the solution into a power series of modified reflection and transmission coefficients in order to obtain rays.