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Sonoluminescence

And there was light!

Nature volume 398, pages 378–379 (1999)Cite this article

It took ten years, but on page 402 of this issue Hilgenfeldt et al.1 are able to explain the tiny dot of light emanating from a solitary, sonically driven bubble, first observed by Felipe Gaitan in 1989. Gaitan had been adjusting the parameters in his apparatus to study a new regime for acoustically levitating a bubble in water — a technique perfected almost three decades before by his PhD advisor, Lawrence Crum — and was surprised to find the bubble emitting what appeared to be a continuous dot of light. Light from sound, or sonoluminescence, was not a new phenomenon, but never had a single bubble been controlled in such a manner. In fact, after careful observation with an appropriate photodetector Gaitan determined that the light was not in fact continuous, but emitted in an extremely brief burst each acoustic cycle2,3. That's 20,000 flashes per second, or 72 million synchronous flashes of light every hour.

During a visit to Crum's laboratory, Seth Putterman immediately realized that this remarkable phenomenon, called single-bubble sonoluminescence (SBSL), might represent new and exciting physics. He set about quantifying with great precision the remarkable characteristics of this light emission, finding that the lifetime and the pulse-to-pulse synchronicity of each flash was on the order of 50 trillionths of a second. His group went on to thoroughly examine how SBSL was dependent on a wide range of experimental parameters4. Over 100 peer-reviewed papers have been published on SBSL since its discovery by Gaitan, but the mechanism of light emission remained elusive until now.

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References

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  1. the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Yale University, 9 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, 06520-8286, Connecticut, USA

    Robert Apfel

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  1. Robert Apfel
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Apfel, R. And there was light!. Nature 398, 378–379 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/18786

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