Exact solution for a photoacoustic wave from a finite-length cylindrical source

In wide-field pulsed photoacoustics, a nearly instantaneous source of electromagnetic energy is applied uniformly to an absorbing medium to create an acoustic wave. In this work, an exact solution is derived for the photoacoustic wave originating from a finite-length solid cylindrical source in terms of known analytic functions involving elliptic integrals of canonical form. The solution is compared with the output of a finite-element simulation.