It is well known that harmonic bounded Gaussian beams undergo a transformation into two bounded beams upon reflection on a solid immersed in a liquid. The effect is known as the Schoch effect and can be found at the Rayleigh angle for thick plates and at the different Lamb angles for thin plates. Here, a study is made on the effect of pulsed Gaussian beams reflected on solids. It is found exper...

S U M M A R Y We present a single station method for the determination of Rayleigh wave ellipticity, or Rayleigh wave horizontal to vertical amplitude ratio (H/V) using Frequency Dependent Polarization Analysis (FDPA). This procedure uses singular value decomposition of 3-by-3 spectral covariance matrices over 1-hr time windows to determine properties of the ambient seismic noise field such as ...

We study the localization of Rayleigh waves propagating in a semi-infinite and isotropic medium with inhomogeneities that are modeled as rods parallel to the incoming wave front and are distributed randomly up to a maximum depth. For a perfectly smooth surface, the localization length of a Rayleigh wave is predicted to reach a minimum at intermediate wavelength l and to diverge for both low and...

The finite-difference (FD) method described here is specially developed to model high-frequency Rayleigh-wave propagation in near-surface mediums. Although many FD programs existed for earthquake research and oil exploration, none has been developed to model high-frequency Rayleigh-wave propagation in near-surface elastic mediums when the source and all receivers are on the free-surface. The sc...

The problem of oblique wave scattering of a Rayleigh wave by a cylindrical cavity in an elastic half-space is solved using the multipole expansion method. Whereas in the analogous water-wave problem a single scalar field is expressed as an infinite multipole expansion, and in the Rayleigh wave case with normal incidence two scalar fields suffice, here we require three coupled scalar multipole e...

We have performed atomic simulations of crack propagation along a weak interface joining two harmonic crystals. The simulations show that a mode II shear dominated crack can accelerate to the Rayleigh wave speed and then nucleate an intersonic daughter that travels at the longitudinal wave speed. This contradicts the general belief that a crack can travel no faster than the Rayleigh speed.