Shape profile of acoustic radiation-induced static displacement pulses in solids

In a recent article Narasimha et al. [J. Appl. Phys. 105, 073506 (2009)] claim to show that the shape of static displacement pulses generated by ultrasonic tone-bursts in nondispersive solids is that of a growing trapezoid in the spatial domain that leads to a flat-topped pulse shape in the time domain for a fixed spatial position. Flaws in their theoretical arguments are corrected to show that their model actually predicts a right-triangular pulse shape for nondispersive monocrystals in both the spatial and time domains as originally reported by Yost and Cantrell [Phys. Rev. B 30, 3221 (1984)] and Cantrell et al. [Phys. Rev. B 35, 9780 (1987)].