Abstract：A new alternative perfectly matched layer (PML) absorbing boundary condition is developed to attenuate the artificial boundary reflections generated in numerical simulation of the secondorder elastic wave equation. The secondorder equation can be described by displacement, which is more appropriate than the firstorder one. Its PML condition conventionally needs to split the displacement into four parts, which occupies a large amount of memory and requires solving a thirdorder differential equation in time. As for the other choice, nonsplitting PML method may be applied to the secondorder equation, but it requires solving the dual integral in time. The new method can solve or simplity the above problems. Finally, a staggeredgrid finite difference method with this PML condition is used to simulate an anisotropic media model and the results show that the method is efficient.
