Lifetime of bubble rafts: cooperativity and avalanches.
We have studied the collapse of pseudo-bi-dimensional foams. These foams are made of uniformly sized soap bubbles packed in an hexagonal lattice sitting at the top of a liquid surface. The collapse process follows the sequence: (1) rupture of a first bubble, driven by thermal fluctuations and (2) a cascade of bursting bubbles. We present a simple numerical model which captures the main characteristics of the dynamics of foam collapse. We show that in a certain range of viscosities of the foaming solutions, the size distribution of the avalanches follows power laws as in self-organized criticality processes.
Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, Université Paris XI, 91405 Orsay, France. ritacco@quim.ucm.es
Hernán
H
Ritacco
Flavien
F
Kiefer
Dominique
D
Langevin