Conversion of Love waves in a forest of trees

We inspect the propagation of shear polarized surface waves akin to Love waves through a forest of trees of the same height atop a guiding layer on a soil substrate. An asymptotic analysis shows that the forest behaves like an infinitely anisotropic wedge with effective boundary conditions. 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 trapped within the trees or converted into a downward propagating bulk (shear) wave. These mechanisms of wave trapping and wave conversion appear to be robust with respect to perturbations of height or position of trees in the metawedge and with respect to three-dimensional effects such as regarding a potential change of elastic wave polarization.