Sonoluminescence

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Sonoluminescence is the emission of brief flashes of light from bubbles in a liquid when they are driven by strong sound waves. The bubbles expand and then collapse rapidly during the acoustic pressure cycle.

In single-bubble sonoluminescence, a bubble can be trapped near a pressure node in a resonant liquid chamber and made to flash repeatedly with remarkable regularity. Multi-bubble sonoluminescence occurs in clouds of cavitating bubbles.

During collapse, the gas inside a bubble is compressed to very high temperature and pressure for an extremely short time. The exact mechanisms that convert this concentrated energy into light have been studied through hydrodynamic, thermal, plasma, and quantum models.

The emitted flashes last from picoseconds to nanoseconds and can contain ultraviolet as well as visible radiation. Sonoluminescence provides a laboratory example of energy concentration, nonlinear oscillation, cavitation, and extreme conditions created by acoustic forcing.

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• Source / publisher: Wikipedia
• URL type: WWW
• Credits: Wikipedia
• URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence