Sonoluminescence and the Heimlich Effect

Abstract

The phenomenon of sonoluminescence (SL), originally observed some sixty years ago, has recently become the focus of renewed interest, particularly with the discovery that one can trap a single bubble and induce it to exhibit SL stably over a large number of acoustical cycles. In this work we shall adopt a version of the provocative suggestion put forward by Schwinger: the mechanism responsible for the radiation in SL is a dynamic version of the Casimir effect. It has been known since Casimir's original work in 1948 that the zero-point energy of quantum fields can be modified by the presence of boundaries, and that these modifications generate observable effects. For example, in Casimir's original work, the quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field in the presence of a pair of uncharged, parallel, perfectly conducting plates were shown to give rise to an attractive force between the plates.