Abstract
In this work, the photothermal waves in an unbounded semiconducting medium with spherical cavity are studied. This problem is solved using the theory of coupled plasma, thermal, and elastic wave. An unbounded material, elastic semiconductor containing a spherical cavity with isotropic and homogeneous thermal and elastic properties has been considered. The inner surface of the cavity is taken traction-free and subjected to an exponentially decaying pulse boundary heat flux. Laplace transform techniques and eigenvalue approach were used to obtain the analytical solutions. Numerical computations have been done for silicon-like semiconductor material, and the results are presented graphically to estimate the effect of time and the coupling between the plasma, thermal, and elastic waves.