Rayleigh wave

A seismic surface wave that travels along a solid’s free boundary, with particles moving in retrograde ellipses and motion decaying with depth.

Elastic wave: A mechanical disturbance that propagates through an elastic medium by displacing its material. Rayleigh waves are elastic disturbances confined near a free boundary.
Surface-wave tomography: A method that maps subsurface wave speeds using surface-wave travel times or dispersion. Rayleigh-wave speeds constrain maps of crustal and upper-mantle structure.
Elasticity: The property of a material that lets it deform under stress and recover when the stress is removed. Rayleigh-wave propagation follows from the solid’s elastic response to displacement.
Lord Rayleigh: John William Strutt, a British physicist whose work spanned acoustics, optics, and wave physics. He derived the existence of the surface-wave mode later named for him.
Surface wave: A wave whose energy is concentrated near an interface or boundary rather than distributed throughout a medium. Rayleigh waves are one of the two principal seismic surface-wave types.
Ambient seismic noise: Continuous ground motion generated by sources such as ocean waves, weather, and human activity. Correlations of ambient noise can recover Rayleigh waves between seismic stations.
Elastic modulus: A measure of a material’s resistance to elastic deformation under applied stress. Elastic moduli, together with density, set the speeds of body waves that shape Rayleigh-wave speed.
Rayleigh's 1885 paper on waves: Lord Rayleigh’s paper deriving a wave that propagates along the free surface of an elastic solid. It introduced the theoretical solution underlying the wave’s name.
Rayleigh-wave polarization: The orientation and phase relationship of particle displacement in a Rayleigh wave. Vertical and horizontal displacements combine to produce elliptical particle paths.
Seismic interferometry: A method that extracts wave propagation between observation points by correlating recorded signals. It can estimate Rayleigh-wave travel paths without a distinct earthquake source.

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