BUBBLE ACOUSTICS: FROM WHALES TO OTHER WORLDS

摘要

Gas bubbles in liquids have an extraordinary ability to interact with sound fields. They are potent generators, absorbers, and scatterers of sound, and can have a profound effect upon the sound speed (changing it on subsecond timescales by a factor of 2 or more under breaking ocean waves, for example). Bubbles generate the song of a babbling brook, and ocean sounds that help us understand the global carbon budget. Bubbles activated by ultrasound can assist industrial processing, or aid medical diagnosis and therapy. This Rayleigh Medal Lecture paper records the work I have undertaken to understand and exploit them.