THE SPREADING OF NONLINEAR ELASTIC SURFACE-WAVES

A theory for the lateral spreading of a beam of nonlinear surface acoustic waves across the surface of an arbitrary, homogeneous, elastic half-space is developed. The resulting evolution equation generalizes that obtained for uni-directional waves by replacing an ordinary derivative by a diffusion operator of Schrodinger type. The coefficients arising in the evolution equation are related to partial derivatives of the dispersion relation for linearized surface waves on the half space. Details are given for isotropic materials and for two special cases of beams travelling along axes of high elastic symmetry.