Sonofusion
an interesting article from the nytimes describing the process of sonofusion, or bubble fusion. in this process, sound waves are used to expand and collapse small bubbles, raising their temperatures drastically and thereby making fusion possible within them. the image above explains the process quite nicely. apparently quite a bit of research is going on in this field, though no energetically efficient systems seem to have been created. (image credit: nytimes)
as an endnote to this post, i am compelled to point out that the idea of bubble fusion clearly fascinates me since i am, indeed, a woman: women and bubbles.
Labels: acoustics, bubbles, fusion, sonofusion
posted by Zosia A. C. Krusberg at
12:35 AM
3 Comments:
The whole sonoluminescence thing is very interesting. I spent a semester trying to make my bubbles light up in undergrad after reading about it in Scientific American (back when there was an "Amateur Scientist" section with interesting experiments to try.) We go to the point of being able to trap our bubble for long periods of time, but our flask just didn't have high enough Q. We lost so much energy that we just couldn't compact the bubble even when we were pumping in 300 watts of sound power. It turns out that most of the people who have gotten it to work with spherical enclosures have had glass-blowers available to make really spherical thin-necked flasks.
Anyway, I haven't looked at it in that much depth in a while, but there were always questions about what mechanism is actually producing the light. Our goal was simply to determine whether it was blackbody emission or not. With blackbodies, the arrival of photons at the detector is correlated so we were hoping to do single-photon timing measurements.
It doesn't really sound like the exact method of light production is fully understood at this point.
Anyway, for the amateur scientists out there, you don't need heavy water to make it work. You just need to strap some piezo speakers on the outside of a flask and pump in some power. Things are never as simple as they should be however.
that sounds very cool, i had no clue you did that as an undergrad!
I've done many many things. :)
I also measured gravity waves and looked into gravitational waves.
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