A new phenomenon of self-induced hysteresis has been observed in the interaction of bulk acoustic waves with a cracked solid. It consists in a hysteretic behavior of material nonlinearity as a function of the incident pump wave amplitude. Hysteresis manifests itself in the self-action of the monochromatic pump wave and in the excitation of its superharmonics and of its subharmonics. The proposed theoretical models attribute the phenomenon to hysteresis in transition of the acoustically forced oscillation of cracks from a nonclapping regime to a regime of clapping contacts.

• Received 9 May 2002

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.90.124301