Modeling sonoluminescence

In single-bubble sonoluminescence, a bubble trapped by a sound wave in a flask of liquid is forced to expand and contract; exactly once per cycle, the bubble emits a very sharp (<50 ps) pulse of visible light. This is a robust phenomenon observable to the naked eye, yet the mechanism whereby the light is produced is not well understood. One model that has been proposed is that the light is “vacuum radiation” generated by the coupling of the electromagnetic fields to the surface of the bubble. In this paper, we simulate vacuum radiation by solving Maxwell’s equations with an additional term that couples the field to the bubble’s motion. We show that, in the static case originally considered by Casimir [Proc. K. Ned. Akad. Nel. 51, 783 (1948)], we reproduce Casimir’s result. In a simple purely time-dependent example, we find that an instability occurs and the pulse of radiation grows exponentially. In the more realistic case of spherically symmetric bubble motion, we again find exponential growth in the context of a small-radius approximation.