Unlock Exclusive Discounts & Flash Sales! Click Here to Join the Deals on Every Wednesday!
Acoustic surface wave excitations of supported homogeneous, continuous layers have been studied in recent years quite extensively by means of Brillouin scattering. However, there remains still the open question concerning the behavior of these excitations when the layer becomes inhomogeneous or even disintegrates into islands or clusters. <br />A softening in the dispersion of the first order localized Sezawa mode with decreasing layer thickness indicates the transition from a continuous to a discontinuous or island layer. In the cluster regime a new type of acoustic surface mode is observed at frequencies above the transverse acoustic (TA) phonon frequency of the substrate.