ABSTRACT
Like much of acoustics, surface acoustic waves (SAW) go back to Lord Rayleigh, and because of this, SAW and Rayleigh waves are usually used synonymously. Rayleigh’s interest in the problem was brought about by his intuitive feeling that they could be a dominant acoustic signal triggered by earthquakes. His 1885 paper on the subject [33] concluded with the wellknown remark “
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It is not improbable that the surface waves here investigated play an important part in earthquakes, and in the collision of elastic solids. Diverging in two dimensions only, they must acquire at a great distance from the source a continually increasing preponderance.” This was indeed found to be the case and Rayleigh’s pioneering work stimulated a great deal of further study of other acoustic modes that could propagate in the layered structure of the earth’s crust.
