Acoustic waveguide Created 2026-10-06 Updated 2026-10-07
An acoustic waveguide confines sound transversely while allowing longitudinal propagation. Rigid walls impose a homogeneous normal-velocity condition, producing Neumann transverse modes. Each transverse eigenvalue gives a longitudinal wave number: modes below their cutoff decay evanescently, while cut-on modes carry outgoing sound. An open semi-infinite guide can be studied with the Wiener-Hopf method.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2006 iii Paper 82 2 a Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Take , put and , and suppress the common factor . The upper-half-plane incident acoustic plane wave is . A rigid zero-thickness screen imposes the same normal-derivative cancellation on both faces; the scattered velocity potential is consequently odd in . Across the open part it is continuous, so its trace there is zero. These complementary half-line data are what make the Wiener-Hopf method applicable.
Use the Fourier transform , with inverse exponential . The outgoing Helmholtz equation solution is for , where has on the propagating interval and positive real part on evanescent components. The limiting absorption principle supplies the contour prescription. The transform of the trace supported on is analytic below the contour. Let be the analytic upper transform of the unknown derivative on . The prescribed derivative on has transformSince the upper normal derivative is , the Wiener-Hopf equation isFor the Wiener-Hopf factorization, choose analytic above and analytic below. Their branch cuts go into the opposite half-planes, with . Dividing by and performing pole subtraction in a Wiener-Hopf equation givesThe forcing pole is allocated to the lower analytic part; the second quotient has a removable pole and is upper analytic. Subtracting these parts leaves a common entire function. The finite-energy edge condition excludes an inverse-square-root singularity in the potential: its odd scattered trace is , so . The normal derivative on the open side can be , giving . Both sides of the entire remainder tend to zero. The Liouville theorem sets that remainder to zero, giving the explicit Wiener-Hopf solution of rigid half-plane diffraction:The scattered field on either side of the screen is thereforeIts forcing-pole residue at is . Deforming to the outgoing steepest descent contour crosses this pole precisely when , where , and . The residue contributes . Thus, away from transition boundaries, the scattered geometrical optics field isAdding the incident acoustic plane wave gives incident plus unit specular reflection in the upper reflected sector, just the incident wave in the remaining illuminated sectors, and zero in the lower shadow sector. The geometrical shadow boundaries also follow directly by tracing a straight ray to : the reflected ray hits the screen at , and the transmitted incident ray crosses the open part at .
For the diffracted contribution, the outgoing phase has saddle , value , and second derivative . Stationary phase therefore supplies . Substituting , and using , givesThe full asymptotic scattered field is . The angular edge-wave expression is not uniform on the geometrical boundaries. There is also a sign inconsistency in the supplied saddle formula: with its printed inverse exponential , the outgoing saddle is , not . The consistent inverse convention used above gives the requested outgoing field without that ambiguity.