Conversion of Love waves in a forest of trees

Abstract

We inspect the propagation of shear polarized surface waves akin to Love waves through a forest of trees of same height atop a guiding layer on a soil substrate. We discover that the foliage of trees { brings a radical change in} the nature of the dispersion relation of these surface waves, which behave like spoof plasmons in the limit of a vanishing guiding layer, and like Love waves in the limit of trees with a vanishing height. When we consider a forest with trees of increasing or decreasing height, this hybrid "Spoof Love" wave is either reflected backwards or converted into a downward propagating bulk wave. An asymptotic analysis shows the forest behaves like an anisotropic wedge with effective boundary conditions.