Surface waves

Solitary surface acoustic waves.

Solitary acoustic pulses can propagate along the surface of a coated homogeneous and inhomogeneous medium. It is shown how these nonlinear surface acoustic waves evolve out of initial pulselike conditions generated by pulsed laser excitation and how they can be monitored by optical detection. The solitary pulse shapes at the surface are computed on the basis of an evolution equation with nonloc...

Nonlinear Hyperbolic Surface Waves

We describe examples of hyperbolic surface waves and discuss their connection with initial boundary value and discontinuity problems for hyperbolic systems of PDEs that are weakly but not uniformly stable.

Parametrically Forced Surface Waves

Scattering of Surface Waves

In this chapter the theory of scattering of elastic surface waves is described. Since surface waves are guided along the surface of materials, the scattering properties of surface waves are useful for probing the heterogeneity of the material near the surface as well as perturbations of the free surface. This has applications in the detection of surface defects (Steg and Klemens, 1974) and in s...

Seismic Surface Waves