Scattering of a sound wave by a vibrating surface

Abstract:

We report an experimental study of the scattering of a sound wave of frequency f by a surface vibrating at frequency F. Both the Doppler shift at the vibrating surface and acoustic nonlinearities in the bulk of the fluid, generate the frequencies f±nF (n integer) in the spectrum of the scattered wave. We show that these two contributions can be separated because they scale differently with respect to the vibration frequency and to the distance between the vibrating scatterer and the detector. We determine the parameter ranges in which one or the other mechanism dominates and present quantitative studies of these two regimes.