Rayleigh waves having generalised lateral dependence

It is shown that the surface-guided elastic waves found by Kiselevfor isotropic materials and having displacements depending linearlyupon the Cartesian coordinate orthogonal to the sagittal planemay be generalised in many ways. For surface waves on any anisotropichalf-space, a simple procedure applied to the displacementswithin the standard surface wave having dependence eⁱ, where k · x – t and k is the (surface) wave vector,yields displacements depending linearly upon the surface cartesiancoordinate orthogonal to the group velocity vector. Moreover,repeated application of this (differentiation) procedure yieldsa hierarchy of waves having algebraic dependence of successivelyincreasing degree. For isotropic materials, substantial simplificationand generalization are possible. Solutions of all algebraicdegrees have identical depth dependence. This allows the solutionsto be constructed iteratively and motivates a search for generalsolutions having depth dependence of the normal displacementthe same as in the standard surface wave. The procedure givesa new derivation of the solutions found by Achenbach havingamplitude of the normal displacement of the surface given byany solution to the two-dimensional Helmholtz equation. Furthermore,exploiting the scale invariance (a property of surface waveson any homogeneous half-space) shows that in every surface-guideddisturbance of an elastic half-space, the elevation of the freesurface is a solution of the wave equation in two dimensions(the membrane equation). Using the paraxial approximation tothe membrane equation, high-frequency Rayleigh waves propagatingas narrow beams are described in terms of a scalar Gaussianbeam.