A review on the analysis of the crustal and upper mantle structure using receiver functions

The discontinuities in the earth such as Moho, lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary (LAB), 410 and 660 km discontinuities, are characterized with an abrupt jump in velocities of P and S waves. The depths of these discontinuities are an important parameter to investigate tectonic evolution in the lithosphere. Receiver functions technique with teleseismic events is very suitable for studying the crust and upper mantle structure beneath stations, thus becoming one of the standard tools for such study. The principle of receiver functions is to separate the converted Ps or Sp phases generated at the discontinuities beneath stations in the case that the direct P or S is a delta function. In this paper, the methods of receiver function analysis are collected from literatures. We introduce the coordinate transform technique for the separation of Ps or Sp waves, the deconvolution algorithm to extract P and S receiver functions, the waveform fitting method to invert for S-wave velocity structure, the stacking technique to improve signals, and the migration from time series to depth domain. With some illustrative examples, the care that should be taken in study of the crustal and upper mantle structure using receiver functions are summarized.