Skip to main content
Semiconductors and electronics

Semiconductors and electronics

Surface acoustic waves go under the microscope

01 Jul 2001

Devices that produce surface acoustic waves often go unnoticed in the engineering and science community, yet they are common in the electronic circuitry of everyday appliances. A small international community is now pushing forward the science of devices based on surface acoustic waves, as well as their applications.

Surface acoustic waves are commonly found in the electronic circuitry of everyday appliances, such as mobile phones and televisions, where they are used to filter frequencies. Surface acoustic waves are also employed in transponders to transmit signals that are modulated in amplitude and frequency to remote locations.

In one recent advance, Thorsten Hesjedal of Stanford University in the US and Gerd Behme of the Paul Drude Institute in Berlin have developed a technique to study elementary wave phenomena at the highest resolution ever. By exploiting the properties of sound waves at short distances (i.e. the so-called near field) and the high resolution of an atomic force microscope, the Stanford-Berlin team obtained acoustical images of gallium-arsenide substrates with a spatial resolution better than 1 µm (Europhys. Lett. 2001 54 154).

In the July issue of Physics World, Walter Arnold of the Fraunhofer Institute for Non-destructive Testing, Saarbrücken, Germany, explains how these new acoustical-imaging techniques will help scientists to understand the macroscopic elastic properties of composite materials and could shed light on the elasticity of biological materials.

Copyright © 2024 by IOP Publishing Ltd and individual contributors