Pulse propagation in an elastic medium with quadratic nonlinearity (L).

This letter examines the propagation of an acoustic pulse in an elastic medium with weak quadratic nonlinearity. Both a displacement pulse and a stress pulse of arbitrary shapes are used to generate the wave motion in the solid. By obtaining the explicit solutions for arbitrary pulse shapes, it is shown that for a sinusoidal tone-burst, in addition to a second order harmonic field, a radiation induced static strain field is also generated. These results help clarify some confusion in the recent literature regarding the shape of the propagating static displacement pulse.