Abstract
Surface elastic waves, discovered by Lord Rayleigh in the late 19th century in the realm of seismology, besides occurring in nature over a wide range of length scales, have found a broad spectrum of technological applications (Sect. 1.1). Surface acoustic waves (SAWs) on the nanometric scale and their quanta, surface phonons, while allowing for signal processing devices operating in the THz domain, hold information on the structure and the interatomic forces at solid surfaces, which generally differ from those of the solid bulk (Sect. 1.2). Inelastic He atom scattering, as compared to other surface phonon probes, offers convenient kinematical conditions for a high-resolution surface phonon spectroscopy over the complete momentum and energy spectral range (Sect. 1.3).
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