August 4, 2014

Bottling Up Sound Waves



Acoustic Bottle Beams from Berkeley Lab Hold Promise for Imaging, Cloaking, Levitation and Other Apps

There’s a new wave of sound on the horizon carrying with it a broad scope of tantalizing potential applications, including advanced ultrasonic imaging and therapy, and acoustic cloaking, levitation and particle manipulation. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a technique for generating acoustic bottles in open air that can bend the paths of sound waves along prescribed convex trajectories.