Scientists have created a sound so strong that it can spray water on contact

The scientists discovered what they thought was the loudest sound possible in the water – a sound so powerful that it could spray water on contact.

This is not the sound of a massive underwater earthquake, nor that of a pistol shrimp that slams its claws louder than a Pink Floyd gig. In fact, it's the sound of a tiny stream of water – about half the width of a human hair – that is struck by an even thinner X-ray laser.

You can not really hear this sound because it was created in a vacuum chamber. This is probably for the better, given that, at around 270 decibels, these rumbling pressure waves are even stronger than the launch of the noisiest rocket ever recorded by NASA (which measured about 205 decibels). However, you can see the devastating effects of sound at the microscopic level, thanks to a series of slow motion videos recorded at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, as part of a new study. [Tiny Grandeur: Stunning Photos of the Very Small]

In the video above, filmed in about 40 nanoseconds (40 billion seconds), the pulsed laser immediately splits the water stream in half, vaporizing the fluid that it touches while sending powerful waves pressure that oscillates on either side of the jet. These waves create more waves and, in about 10 nanoseconds, stifling black clouds of collapsing bubbles form on either side of the cavity.

According to Claudiu Stan, a physicist at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, one of the co-authors of the study, these pressure waves probably represent the loudest sound possible under the influence of radiation. ;water. If he was stronger, the sound would "boil the liquid," Stan told Live Science – and once the water boils, the sound no longer has any way to pass.

Why try to discover a sound that tears his own medium? According to Stan, understanding the limits of underwater sound could help researchers design future experiments.

Scientists regularly suspend small fragments of intriguing material – such as a specific type of protein crystal – in fluid jets and sand them with lasers to determine their chemical properties. If scientists know exactly how intense a laser pulse can be without accidentally destroying the liquid, it could improve the way these experiments are performed, Stan said. This is especially true for studies in which scientists hit material samples with strong beams to test the material. structural integrity.

"This research can help us study how the microscopic samples would react if they were strongly vibrated by the underwater sound," Stan said.

This is not the first time SLAC researchers have used this X-ray laser to test the limits of physics. In a study conducted in 2017, researchers used the same laser to extract electrons from an atom, creating a "molecular black hole" that sucked all available electrons from nearby atoms. Taken in tandem, this study and the new lead to an irrefutable conclusion: lasers are really, really cool.

The new study was published April 10 in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

Originally published on Science live.