Title: A tale of "coupled" bubbles
by Vikash Pandey
Abstract:
A bubble is a gas trapped within a medium of denser material which is often a liquid. These two phase (gas-liquid) media are often born from chance and usually end their short life violently in the union with the nearly infinite! The scientific aesthetics attached with bubbles can be inferred from the fact that their investigation has attracted great minds such as Leonardo da Vinci, George Gabriel Stokes, and Lord Rayleigh. Bubbles often come into existence in huge clusters of bubble-clouds that could have varying population of individual bubbles, from few of tens to millions! Such a cloud of bubbles have known to tear apart steel, cement, human tissue, and so much more! The two-bubble case constitutes the simplest form of such a complex bubble-cloud dynamics. Sometimes the bubbles may come close, but they may also tend to distance away from one another. But nevertheless, their collective behavior is always coupled, i.e., the response of a bubble is determined by the response from the bubble in its immediate vicinity. On the one hand, a complete understanding of bubbles is pivotal for many industrial applications such as turbomachinery, biomedical ultrasound, shock wave lithotripsy, material processing, and seismic exploration. On the other hand, even though bubbles are easily amenable to our imagination, they are notoriously difficult for scientific investigation. In this talk, I will qualitatively explain the physics of bubble dynamics, the two-bubble case, and why we should study them. Some really cool facts about bubbles will be mentioned too.