When a liquid is subjected to high-intensity ultrasound, bubbles are formed, grow, and implosively collapse. This phenomenon of acoustic cavitation generates both chemical reactions (i.e., sonochemistry) and the emission of light (i.e., sonoluminescence, SL). It is generally agreed that both sonochemistry and sonoluminescence result from the intense compressional heating of gas and vapor inside...

In single-bubble sonoluminescence, an ultrasound-driven microbubble undergoes violent oscillations and converts part of the energy of the sound field into visible light. Since its discovery ten years ago, a consistent theory of the dynamics and stability of the bubble has been developed. The approach includes the dissociation of molecular gases inside the collapsing bubble to explain striking d...

Single bubble sonoluminescence is not an exotic phenomenon but can quantitatively be accounted for by applying a few well-known, simple concepts: the Rayleigh–Plesset dynamics of the bubble’s radius, polytropic uniform heating of the gas inside the bubble during collapse, the dissociation of molecular gases, and thermal radiation of the remaining hot noble gas, where its finite opacity ~transpa...

Only a small fraction of the high-dimensional parameter space that governs the occurrence of stable single-bubble sonoluminescence (SBSL) has been explored so far. We predict that decreasing the acoustic driving frequency f upscales SBSL. More specifically, at f ­ 5 kHz we expect more than 100 times as many photons per flash as at f ­ 20 kHz and a flash width of about 1000 ps. The application o...

After a brief discussion of a possible relationship between the electroweak phase transition in highly compressed matter and gravitational collapse, we examine the speculative possibility that the electroweak phase transition might be contemporarily occurring in processes in neutron stars. We conjecture that adiabatic compression of neutron star matter due to focusing of the energy from a super...

Sonoluminescence (SL), the phenomenon of light emission from nonlinear motion of a gas bubble, involves an extreme degree of energy focusing. The conditions within the bubble during the last stages of the nearly catastrophic implosion are thought to parallel the efforts aimed at developing inertial confinement fusion. A limited review on the topic of SL and its possible connection to bubble nuc...

Single-bubble sonoluminescence occurs when an acoustically trapped and periodically driven gas bubble collapses so strongly that the energy focusing at collapse leads to light emission. Detailed experiments have demonstrated the unique properties of this system: the spectrum of the emitted light tends to peak in the ultraviolet and depends strongly on the type of gas dissolved in the liquid; sm...