Observation of the "Luxemburg-Gorky effect" for elastic waves.

An experimental observation of a new nonlinear-modulation effect for longitudinal elastic waves is reported. The phenomenon is a direct elastic wave analogy with the so-called Luxemburg-Gorky (L-G) effect known over 60 years for radio waves propagating in the ionosphere. The effect consists of the appearance of modulation of a weaker initially non-modulated wave propagating in a nonlinear medium in the presence of an amplitude-modulated stronger wave that produces perturbations in the medium properties on the scale of its modulation frequency. The reported transfer of modulation from one elastic wave to another was observed in a resonator cut of a glass rod containing a few small cracks. Presence of such a small damage drastically enhances the material nonlinearity compared to elastic atomic nonlinearity of homogeneous solids, so that the pronounced L-G type cross-modulation could be observed at strain magnitude in the stronger wave down to 10(-7) and smaller. Main features of the effect are pointed out and physical mechanism of the observed phenomena is discussed.