Shock wave

About: Shock wave is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 36184 publications have been published within this topic receiving 635848 citations. The topic is also known as: Shock waves & shockwave.

Dynamics of shock waves and cavitation bubbles generated by picosecond laser pulses in corneal tissue and water

Abstract: Time-resolved flash photography was used to investigate the dynamics of shock waves and cavitation bubbles generated by picosecond optical breakdown in bovine corneal tissue and water. A picosecond Nd:YLF laser was employed. A rapid decay of the shock waves was observed in both materials, with similar temporal characteristics, indicating that water serves as a good model for shock wave studies. In contrast, differences in the cavitation bubble dynamics were found between cornea and water, which are related to differences in the mechanical and thermal properties of the two media, suggesting that water should not be used to model cavitation dynamics in cornea. The experimental results also suggest that the efficiency of intrastromal ablation may be increased by using short pulses and moderate pulse energies in order to avoid the creation of large cavitation bubbles. The experiment indicates that the optimum laser repetition rate for intrastromal ablation is between 1 and 5 kHz. © 1994 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

New mechanism for electron heating in shocks.

Abstract: Electron trajectories diverge exponentially in a sufficiently small-scale electrostatic field with a static external magnetic field. This electron trajectory instability results in the electron heating in field structure typical for the collisionless shock front ramp. The magnitude of the effect is sufficient to explain the observed heating at the Earth's bow shock and interplanetary shocks. The heating features are consistent with the observations.

Shock waves in trombones

Abstract: Based on physical models of musical instruments and of the human voice, a new generation of sound synthesizers is born: virtual instruments. The models used for wind instruments are simple feedback loops in which a nonlinear sound source drives a linear filter representing the pipe of the instrument. While very rewarding musical sounds have been obtained with these models, it has become obvious that some essential phenomena escape such a description. In particular the brightness of the sound generated by trombones is expected to be due to the essential nonlinearity of the wave propagation in the pipe. At fortissimo levels this leads to shock wave formation observed in our experiments both from pressure measurements and flow visualization. A modest modification of the physical model could already take this phenomenon into account. The key idea is that the nonlinear effect is essential for the transfer of sound from the source toward the listener, but can be ignored in a model of the generation of the pipe ...

The dynamics of shock accelerated light and heavy gas cylinders

Abstract: Experiments have been carried out in which a cylindrical volume of a gas, that is either lighter or heavier than its surroundings, is impulsively accelerated by a weak shock wave. Laminar jets of helium or sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) are used to produce the cylinders, and planar laser‐induced fluorescence is used to visualize the flow. It is found that the vorticity deposited on the boundary of the SF6 cylinder by the interaction with the shock wave, separates from the heavy gas to form a pair of vortices, which subsequently wrap the SF6 around them. This process is quite different from what is observed in the light gas experiments, which showed a small amount of helium to remain with the vorticity, eventually becoming part of the vortex cores. Centrifugal forces combined with differences in the rates of the diffusion of vorticity in the two gases are given as possible reasons for these differences. Measurement of the initial downstream velocity for a heavy gas cylinder is found to agree well with a theory based on two simple models. But, because diffusion causes the light gas jet density to be significantly greater than that of pure helium, the theory overpredicts the measured velocity of the light gas experiments. The final translational velocities for both light and heavy gas experiments are not accurately predicted by the model, and measurements of the vortex spacing are found to be significantly larger than those indicated by this theory. These differences are likely caused by the theory’s inability to accurately describe the viscous nonuniform flow.

Neutrino signatures of supernova forward and reverse shock propagation

Abstract: A few seconds after bounce in a core-collapse supernova, the shock wave passes the density region corresponding to resonant neutrino oscillations with the 'atmospheric' neutrino mass difference. The transient violation of the adiabaticity condition manifests itself in an observable modulation of the neutrino signal from a future galactic supernova. In addition to the shock wave propagation effects that were previously studied, a reverse shock forms when the supersonically expanding neutrino-driven wind collides with the slower earlier supernova ejecta. This implies that for some period the neutrinos pass two subsequent density discontinuities, giving rise to a 'double-dip' feature in the average neutrino energy as a function of time. We study this effect both analytically and numerically and find that it allows one to trace the positions of the forward and reverse shocks. We show that the energy dependent neutrino conversion probabilities allow one to detect oscillations even if the energy spectra of different neutrino flavours are the same as long as the fluxes differ. These features are observable in the signal for an inverted and in the νe signal for a normal neutrino mass hierarchy, provided the 13-mixing angle is 'large' ().