Talk:Rayleigh wave

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Untitled[edit]

I don't know that Pacinian corpuscles function "expressly" to detect earthquakes. A little googling on the matter is inconclusive. Thus, I am rewriting this bit. Gwimpey 05:35, Feb 5, 2005 (UTC) Well, I went bananas and wrote a much longer article. Whee! Gwimpey 06:21, Feb 5, 2005 (UTC)

Should "Lamb Wave" and "Rayleigh-Lamb Wave" redirect to this page? --Joe056 15:24, 14 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Lamb wave is a different type of wave. Time of flight

The article is too focused on sismology. The general explanations shouldn´t be related to sismology concepts since Rayleigh waves are a mathematical concept, and appear in many other contexts.--Chali2

Having read the comments on this Talk, this article has now been revised to be a more balanced and accurate portrayal of Rayleigh waves. Rayleigh waves are strictly just waves at the surface of a semi-infinite isotropic solid (in a vacuum, strictly), and are not connected to any particular field of study. The article was therefore edited to balance the different approaches to this field. I did not like to delete content, so I left the Rayleigh-Lamb wave appelation in, but it is not a pure Rayleigh wave. In multilayer surface wave propagation problems one refers to generalized Rayleigh waves too, so to some extent it is OK to include guided waves. Femtoquake (talk) 11:29, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Problems with this article[edit]

Strictly speaking Rayleigh wave only exists on the boundary between an elastic half space and a vacuum, and is non-dispersive. If the other half space is a fluid, the interface wave on the solid side is called a leaky Rayleigh wave, and it leaks energy into the fluid, and will attenuate in the propagation path. Time of flight

Now, what strict definition of Rayleigh waves (RW) would that be? RW occur at every impedance contrast within a body or between two bodies as long as longitudinal and transverse wave propagation is both supported on at least one side of the medium. That requires a solid for mechanical waves, and is impossible for EM waves, I guess. (What "many other contexts" are there? Water waves are also very different.) Apart from that, RW are always attenuated by internal friction, and they are always dispersive except for the idealized case of an infinite homogeneous half-space.

One major problem with the article is the particle motion. It is retrograde at the surface as seen in the Figure, but it deforms to purely vertical at some shallow depth (smaller than the wavelength) and then turns prograde at greater depths. This is not what the article says.Linkray12 17:24, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Unclear[edit]

What does this mean? "The depth of significant displacement in the solid is approximately equal to the acoustic wavelength."Dr eng x (talk) 05:00, 3 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]