Calculation of light emission in sonoluminescence

Abstract

We modify a uniform model of single bubble sonoluminescence, in which heat diffusion, water vapor diffusion and chemical reactions are included to describe the bubble dynamics, and the processes of electron-atom bremsstrahlung, electron-ion bremsstrahlung and recombination radiation, radiative attachment of electrons to atoms and molecules, line emissions of OH radicals and Na atoms are taken into account to calculate the light emission. With this model, we compute the light pulse width, the photon number per flash, the continuum and line spectra and the gas species as the products of chemical reactions, and try to compare with all the experimental data available. We obtain good agreement with the observations of Ar and Xe bubbles in many cases, but fail to match the experimental data of the photon number per flash. We also find that for He bubble the computed photon number is always too small to interpret the observations.