24 research outputs found
On the acoustic diffraction by the edges of benthic shells
Author Posting. © Acoustical Society of America, 2004. This article is posted here by permission of Acoustical Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 116 (2004): 239-244, doi:10.1121/1.1675813.Recent laboratory measurements of acoustic backscattering by individual benthic shells have isolated the edge-diffracted echo from echoes due to the surface of the main body of the shell. The data indicate that the echo near broadside incidence is generally the strongest for all orientations and is due principally to the surface of the main body. At angles well away from broadside, the echo levels are lower and are due primarily to the diffraction from the edge of the shell. The decrease in echo levels from broadside incidence to well off broadside is shown to be reasonably consistent with the decrease in acoustic backscattering from normal incidence to well off normal incidence by a shell-covered seafloor. The results suggest the importance of the edge of the shell in off-normal-incidence backscattering by a shell-covered seafloor. Furthermore, when considering bistatic diffraction by edges, there are implications that the edge of the shell (lying on the seafloor) can cause significant scattering in many directions, including at subcritical angles.This research was supported by the U.S. Office of Naval
Research (Grant No. N00014-02-1-0095) and the Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Woods Hole, MA
Surfaces roughness effects on the transmission of Gaussian beams by anisotropic parallel plates
Influence of the plate surfaces roughness in precise ellipsometry experiments
is studied. The realistic case of a Gaussian laser beam crossing a uniaxial
platelet is considered. Expression for the transmittance is determined using
the first order perturbation theory. In this frame, it is shown that
interference takes place between the specular transmitted beam and the
scattered field. This effect is due to the angular distribution of the Gaussian
beam and is of first order in the roughness over wavelength ratio. As an
application, a numerical simulation of the effects of quartz roughness surfaces
at normal incidence is provided. The interference term is found to be strongly
connected to the random nature of the surface roughness.Comment: 18 pages, Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, volume 36, issue 21,
pages 2697 - 270
An Impact Genesis for Loki Patera?
What happens when a large impact event takes place on a satellite with a thin crust and lithosphere? In the early Solar System impact cratering and volcanism were the dominate processes shaping the surfaces of the terrestrial planets. Impact events may have triggered additional volcanism by uplifting partially molten mantle material to the surface, where it melts due to pressure release. Subsequently, the shattered crust may have provided pathways for magma to reach the surface creating a longer term hot spot. As the crusts of the terrestrial planets thickened, the ability of impacts to trigger volcanism diminished [1]. However, the highly-volcanic jovian satellite Io is located in a "high-impact" area of the Solar System [2], a victim of material attracted by Jupiter s gravitational field. In 1994 huge impacts were observed when fragments of comet Shoemaker- Levy 9 impacted Jupiter. The large icy satellites of Jupiter (Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) are pockmarked with many impact craters. Yet no impact features have been found on Io [3]. This is because of rapid resurfacing of Io due to volcanism, estimated at approx.1 cm/year [4] which over short geological time erases evidence of impacts. Io, however, has a lithosphere over a molten or partially-molten mantle [e.g., 5], and the effects of a sufficiently large impact may extend far beyond the evolution of the impact crater alone. At least one example of impact-triggered volcanism may exist in the Solar System today: the Loki Patera complex on Io