LIGHT-SCATTERING BY SURFACE ACOUSTIC-WAVES ON CORRUGATED METAL-SURFACES

We report the results of a Brillouin-scattering study of corrugated Ag surfaces. The corrugation plays a dramatic role in the wave-vectorselection rules governing coupling to surface phonons, and this effect is substantially different when the effective wave vector of the surface corrugation is collinear or perpendicular to the scattering plane. In processes that involve the grating wave vector, we show that the coupling mechanism between light and phonons is governed by surface plasmons which introduce a new scattering interaction with unusual polarization features in the Brillouin-scattering process. © 1990 The American Physical Society.