Leaky wedge acoustic waves in single-crystal silicon

In anisotropic media, the existence of leaky surface acoustic waves is a well-known phenomenon. Very recently, their analogs at the apex of an elastic silicon wedge have been found in experiments using laser-ultrasonics. In addition to a wedge-wave (WW) pulse with low speed, a pseudo-wedge wave (p-WW) pulse was found with a velocity higher than the velocity of shear bulk waves, propagating in the same direction. With a probe-beam-deflection technique, the propagation of the WW pulses was monitored on one of the faces of the wedge at variable distance from the apex. In this way, their depth structure and the leakage of the p-WW could be visualized directly. Calculations were carried out using a method based on a representation of the displacement field in Laguerre functions. This method has been validated by calculating the surface density of states in anisotropic media and comparing the results with those obtained from the surface Green´s tensor. The approach has then been extended to the continuum of acoustic modes in infinite wedges with fixed wave-vector along the apex. These calculations confirmed the measured speeds of the WW and p-WW pulses.