Love wave

A Love wave is a seismic surface wave that shears the ground horizontally, perpendicular to its direction of travel, with motion confined to Earth’s surface plane.

Shear wave: A seismic body wave that displaces material perpendicular to its direction of travel. Love waves are guided shear motion, redirected into horizontal surface-parallel oscillation.
Shear modulus: A material property measuring resistance to shear deformation. It helps determine the speed of the horizontally polarized motion in each layer.
Rayleigh wave: A seismic surface wave with elliptical particle motion in a vertical plane. Rayleigh waves move ground vertically as well as along propagation, unlike Love waves.
Surface-wave tomography: An imaging method that uses surface-wave travel times or dispersion to map subsurface structure. Love-wave dispersion constrains shear structure beneath seismic stations.
Augustus Edward Hough Love: A British mathematician who developed influential theories of elasticity and geophysical waves. Love’s 1911 analysis gave the surface-wave mode its name.
Surface wave: A wave that travels along an interface, with amplitude concentrated near that boundary. Love waves belong to the seismic waves trapped near Earth’s surface.
Seismic velocity: The speed at which a seismic disturbance propagates through a material. Love-wave speed depends on the shear-wave velocities of the layers beneath the surface.
P wave: A compressional seismic body wave with particle motion parallel to propagation. P waves travel through Earth’s interior rather than as horizontally polarized surface motion.
Ambient noise tomography: A method that images Earth using correlations of persistent background seismic noise. Correlated noise can recover surface-wave signals, including Love-wave dispersion.
Theory of the Earth: A field of geophysics concerned with Earth’s internal structure and physical behavior. Love waves became a tool for probing the layered structure of the planet.

Linked from 5 pages

Seismic waveBroader topic: Its strong horizontal motion can produce damaging forces during earthquakes.