Grains of SAWs: Associating quasi-particles to surface acoustic waves

This work aims at showing how to associate quasi-particles in inertial or non-inertial motion with surface-wave solutions, especially for Rayleigh and Bleustein–Gulyaev surface waves on elastic or piezoelectric substrates (by way of examples). Perturbations of various kinds (surface energy, connection to an external fluid or an external electric field, viscosity of the substrate) are also envisaged. The technique employed for this is based on the exploitation of the conservation equations for energy and wave-momentum deduced via Noether’s theorem or by direct computation, and associated with the basic field equations of which we already know the analytic continuum solutions. Volume integration of the conservation laws is then performed over a volume representative of the surface wave motion.