Why Does Collapsing a Bubble with a Sound Wave Produce Light?
Posted3 months agoActive2 months ago
akshatjiwannotes.blogspot.comResearchstory
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SonoluminescencePhysicsAcoustics
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Sonoluminescence
Physics
Acoustics
The post explores the phenomenon of sonoluminescence, where collapsing a bubble with a sound wave produces light, sparking a thoughtful discussion among HN users about the underlying physics and its implications.
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Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
https://arxiv.org/html/2505.23850v1
In air bubbles NOx would be likely but it would probably lead to nitric acid production after reacting with water. Here's a paper by NASA that pretty much confirms your intuition
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20050215681/downloads/20...
Whatever gas you make bubbles from is going to be ionised(plasma is created during cavitation) and it's going to produce a cocktail of chemicals inside as it cools below ionisation temperature.
Many of these are shortlived eg oxygen reacts with hydrogen or nitrogen to form more stable compounds but some intermediaries can be stable and be detected.
The absolute max amount of nitric acid you can get for example is proportional to the amount of air dissolved in water. If you cavitate entire 1L of water max HNo3 you can get is about 20mg. Realistically it's not possible to cavitate such a large volume of water at once and there's a competition among reactants to form other products eg oxygen is going to used for hydrogen peroxide as well. Very sensitive instruments are used to detect these.
This is studied in sonochemistry —using bubbles to drive chemical reactions.Not enough for large scale production but small doses of chemicals — mostly radicals can be delivered by bubbles making it useful as a disinfectant.
I like full links on the post because it makes it easier to backup. If I embed them in anchor tags they'd have to be parsed from the formatted web page or I'd have to store data as an html file. I don't want to do that.
md is a good alternative and slowly I'm migrating my files to GitHub.
Sounds like a perfect use-case for the tried and true steam turbine. You can never beat a steam turbine.
Sonoluminescence is weird and awesome enough as is: cavitation that produces light.
for example a in a 1um radius bubble the total mass of gas would be ~ 10^-18kg.
Personally I doubt fusion occurs inside bubbles. Even if we take the highest reported temp 30000K that's way below what's required for fusion.
Also bubble literature is full of fantastic claims—one that comes to mind is assertion that pressures of around 10Gpa can be generated which seems highly improbable because that's likely to induce phase change in the fluid.
However it's quite possible that I'm wrong. Because bubble science keeps on throwing new surprises.
> However it's quite possible that I'm wrong. Because bubble science keeps on throwing new surprises.
Ultimately that's my assertion. No need for exaggerated/optimistic claims when something interesting turns up about it on a regular basis.
Do you have any ideas on how detection can be made in a bubble radius of say 100um?
In laser fusion experiments the pellet size is in mm range and it's completely filled with solid/liquid hydrogen to achive high particle density.Thats not possible in a bubble.
The thing is even for something as well studied as sonoluminescence there is no scientific consensus. Literature is all over the place when it comes to bubble gas temperature during cavitation.
Lots of arguments and debates are ongoing in the community. I think that's what happened with fusion story.
National ignition facility (NIF) recently got exited about more energy out than they put in. They don't have a plan for #2 or #3- but as a research facility focusing on #1 thats OK.
Numerous tokamak designs try to handle #1 and #2, but handle #3 by putting rails into the reactor for robots to replace and repair things.
I'm very pessimistic about #3- nothing is immune to neutron damage from fusion, it's just engineering it to fail in a way thats useful. And, once the public accepts the problem, produces less nuclear waste than fission.
Good thing is science doesn't change like tech. Once you learn something it's for life. No need to keep learning new frameworks/tools every year. It's stable and yet immensely flexible.
With AI research and studying has become a lot easier. Give it a try if you're interested.Now is a great time to start.
https://iwaponline.com/wst/article/86/2/302/89569/Hydrodynam...