Slowness surfaces, ray velocity surfaces and phonon focussing in highT c superconductor crystals

This paper reports the results of the study of anisotropy in elastic wave propagation in single crystal superconducting BSCCO. The inverse and group velocities of elastic waves propagating in different directions have been computed and the corresponding slowness and ray velocity surfaces plotted, taking elastic constant data from literature. In addition, the phenomenon of phonon focussing has been investigated in this material by computing the phonon enhancement factor along different directions in spherical polar coordinates. The abnormally high values in phonon enhancement factor exhibited in certain directions for the phonon modes are interpreted as due to caustics occurring in the geometrical acoustics approximation adopted in the computational analysis. The results in LSCO and YBCO are found to be similar to those in BSCCO.