  The normal modes of a commensurate monolayer solid may be damped by mixing
with elastic waves of the substrate. This was shown by B. Hall et al., Phys.
Rev. B 32, 4932 (1985), for perpendicular adsorbate vibrations in the presence
of an isotropic elastic medium. That work is generalized with an elastic
continuum theory of the response of modes of either parallel or perpendicular
polarization for a spherical adsorbate on a hexagonal substrate. The results
are applied to the discussion of computer simulations and inelastic atomic
scattering experiments for adsorbates on graphite. The extreme anisotropy of
the elastic behavior of the graphite leads to quite different wave vector
dependence of the damping for modes polarized perpendicular and parallel to the
substrate. A phenomenological extension of the elasticity theory of the
graphite to include bond-bending energies improves the description of substrate
modes with strong anomalous dispersion and enables a semi-quantitative account
of observed avoided crossings of the adlayer perpendicular vibration mode and
the substrate Rayleigh mode.
