Polarization Precession Effects for Shear Elastic Waves in Rotated Solids

Developments of Solid-State Gyroscopy during last decades are impressive and were based on thin-walled shell resonators like HRG or CRG made from fused quartz or leuko-sapphire. However, a number of design choices for inertial-grade gyroscopes, which can be used for high-g applications and for mass- or middle-scale production, is still very limited. So, considerations of fundamental physical effects in solids that can be used for development of a miniature, completely solid-state, and lower-cost sensor look urgent. There is a variety of different types of bulk acoustic (elastic) waves (BAW) in anisotropic solids. Shear waves with different variants of their polarization have to be studied especially carefully, because shear sounds in glasses and crystals are sensitive to a turn of the solid as a whole, and, so, they can be used for development of gyroscopic sensors. For an isotropic medium (for a glass or a fine polycrystalline body), classic Lame's theorem (so-called, a general solution of Elasticity Theory or Green-Lame's representation) has been modified for enough general case: an elastic medium rotated about an arbitrary set of axes. Travelling, standing, and mixed shear waves propagating in an infinite isotopic medium (or between a pair of parallel reflecting surfaces) have been considered too. An analogy with classic Foucault's pendulum has been underlined for the effect of a turn of a polarizational plane (i.e., an integration effect for an input angular rate) due to a medium's turn about the axis of the wave propagation. These cases demonstrate a whole-angle regime of gyroscopic operation. Single-crystals are anisotropic media, and, therefore, to reflect influence of the crystal's rotation, classic Christoffel-Green's tensors have been modified. Cases of acoustic axes corresponding to equal velocities for a pair of the pure-transverse (shear) waves have of an evident applied interest. For such a special direction in a crystal, different polarizations of waves are possible, and the gyroscopic effect of "polarizational precession" can be observed like for a glass. Naturally, formation of a wave pattern in a massive elastic body is much more complex due to reflections from its boundaries. Some of these complexities can be eliminated. However, a non-homogeneity has a fundamental nature for any amorphous medium due to its thermodynamically-unstable micro-structure, having fluctuations of the rapidly-frozen liquid. For single-crystalline structures, blockness (walls of dislocations) plays a similar role. Physical nature and kinematic particularities of several typical "drifts" in polarizational BAW gyros (P-BAW) have been considered briefly too. They include irregular precessions ("polarizational beats") due to: non-homogeneity of mass density and elastic moduli, dissymmetry of intrinsic losses, and an angular mismatch between propagation and acoustic axes.