Surface acoustic waves propagating along the grooves of a periodic grating

In this paper the propagation of surface acoustic waves along the grooves of a periodically corrugated surface is studied. It is shown that in addition to a surface acoustic wave of predominantly sagittal polarization, which corresponds to the Rayleigh wave, an additional surface wave exists which is of predominantly shear horizontal polarization. While the former remains localized at the surface for arbitrarily short wavelengths, the latter has a limited range of existence. The dispersion curves of these surface waves are calculated numerically for a shallow sawtooth grating.