title: Thermal noise and the stability of single sonoluminescing bubbles
abstract: The stability of a bubble levitated in an acoustic field under single bubble sonoluminescence conditions was numerically investigated taking thermal noise effects into consideration. Due to the microscopic size of a sonoluminescing bubble thermal noise is important to its surface and is found to cause small irregularities in its spherical shape. A stochastic differential equation in Langevin form is derived to describe the dynamics of a perturbation from the spherical and solved together with the Rayleigh-Plesset equation. The mechanisms responsible for the amplification of small irregularities are examined and a stability threshold is derived, which is in good agreement with experimental threshold data of Holt and Gaitan.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Computing Science and Engineering, Department of Mathematical Sciences, De Montfort University, Leicester, England. uha@dmu.ac.uk
authors.initials: UH
authors.lastname: Augsdorfer
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Evans
authors.initials: DP
authors.lastname: Oxley