Generation and Detection of Higher Harmonics in Rayleigh Waves Using Laser Ultrasound

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, i would like to thank my advisor Prof. Laurence J. Jacobs for all his support during my stay in Atlanta. He helped me in desperate situations and motivated me whenever it was necessary. Because of his financial and organizational commitment , i could present the results of this thesis at the Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation (QNDE) conference in Brunswick, Maine. I also want to thank Dr. Jin-Yeon Kim for all the fruitful discussions and the good coffee we had together. He helped me in an outstanding way to finish the experiments. I thank Prof. Jianmin Qu for his support and for giving me access to the facilities of the School of Mechanical Engineering. Moreover, i want to thank Prof. E. Michaels for letting me use their lapping machine and Kritsakorn Luangvilai for showing me how to use the laser interferometer. Special thanks go to Prof. Lothar Gaul for choosing me as a candidate for the ISAP Program which is financially supported by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). The DAAD is gratefully acknowledged for supporting me with its scholarship. I also want to thank Matthias Maess for his help in organizing the exchange program. Furthermore i would like to express my deepest gratitude to my family who is supporting me in an extraordinary way. I also want to thank all my friends in Germany and all my new friends in the U.S. Special thanks go to Ben, Helge, Thorsten (Spoon), Eak and Bo for the great working atmosphere in the lab. Last, but not least, i want to thank Ying Shanna Zhou for her love and patience with me.