Revisiting the Acousto-Electric Effect

The goal of this paper is to provide a new perspective on the acousto-electric effect by deriving a wave equation for the acoustic field that is akin to Stokes 1845 viscous wave equation and in which the phonon-electron interaction provides the loss/gain term. We hope this new perspective may provide some insight into the workings of the acousto-electric effect, and we use it to build connections to other areas of research, in particular inertial motion superradiance and the Zel’dovich effect.