“…The sudden expansion of this line source launches surface waves of limited divergence, propagating along the surface, perpendicularly to the focusing line. The component of the surface displacement normal to the surface itself can be measured, at various distances from the line source, by optical interferometry (Neubrand & Hess, 1992;Withfield et al, 2000), or, in a simpler and more robust way, by a piezoelectric sensor (Lehmann et al, 2002;Schneider et al, 1997Schneider et al, , 1998Schneider et al, , 2000. The recorded displacement is frequency analyzed, yielding the dispersion relation ) ( f v for a frequency interval that can extend over a full frequency decade (e.g.…”