On the Fr\'echet derivative in elastic obstacle scattering

In this paper, we investigate the existence and characterizations of the Fr'echet derivatives of the solution to time-harmonic elastic scattering problems with respect to the boundary of the obstacle. Our analysis is based on a technique - the factorization of the difference of the far-field pattern for two different scatterers - introduced by Kress and Pa"ivarinta to establish Fr'echet differentiability in acoustic scattering. For the Dirichlet boundary condition an alternative proof of a differentiability result due to Charalambopoulos is provided and new results are proven for the Neumann and impedance exterior boundary value problems.