When the laser intercepted the water stream, ultrafast ionisation took place in the microjet as the water was heated, vaporising the liquid and creating a cylindrical shock wave that propagated along the jet.
Sound isn’t just something we hear. It’s a formidable physical phenomenon – a wave of pressure that reverberates through the air around us.
But the medium sound moves through doesn’t have to be air. Incredibly loud sounds can also travel through water, sometimes even being the result of particularly noisy fish. But if you really want to make a racket under the waves, experts recommend lasers.
In a new experiment, researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory used an X-ray laser to produce an extremely loud noise.
It was so extremely loud, in fact, the team says it was right at the limit of being the loudest possible sound that could ever be produced in water, theoretically speaking.
“It is just below the threshold where [the sound] would boil the water in a single wave oscillation,” physicist Claudiu Stan, now with Rutgers University Newark, told Physics Buzz.
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