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Forget what you know about sound in space
Forget what you know about sound in space
This weekend, learn how a new discovery challenges the idea that sound cannot be heard in space. Physicists have demonstrated that there are situations when sound can be transmitted across a vacuum.
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New research challenges the established belief that sound cannot travel through the vacuum of space. Physicists Zhuoran Geng and Ilari Maasilta have analytically demonstrated that sound waves can “tunnel” through a vacuum gap between two piezoelectric materials under specific conditions.
Piezoelectric materials have the special ability to convert vibrations into electrical signals. The researchers found that sound waves propagating on the surfaces of two piezoelectric crystals on either side of a small vacuum gap can couple together electrically. This allows the sound to effectively “leap” across the vacuum gap.
The tunneling effect works best when the gap is smaller than the sound wave’s wavelength. It may have promising applications in electronics, sensors, cooling devices, and more.
The key insight is that while sound waves themselves cannot propagate through pure vacuum, the electric fields they generate in piezoelectric materials can bridge the gap. Remarkably, the scientists even discovered configurations that achieve 100% transmission efficiency.
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This acoustic tunneling phenomenon unlocks novel possibilities for transmitting and manipulating sound using electric fields to couple vibrations through vacuum gaps.
The discovery may also lead to improvements in electronic sensors and MEMS devices by giving designers new options for transmitting signals. The tunneling effect can work for audio, ultrasound, and even hypersound frequencies, as long as the gap width shrinks appropriately for higher frequencies.
Additionally, the ability to control sound waves and vibrations across vacuum gaps opens up thermal management applications. The tunneling effect could enable new approaches to cooling electronics by transmitting heat through piezoelectric materials.
This discovery hints at a surprising new physics for how sound and electric fields can interact across seemingly empty space, and provides scientists with a new model for acoustic behavior at the nanoscale level.
Click below to read the full story of the discovery now.
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“We also found situations where the full energy of the wave jumps across the vacuum with 100% efficiency, without any reflections.”
Professor Ilari Maasilta
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