Multimedia Gallery
Sound Bullet
Potential employment of a nonlinear acoustic lens to generate a sound bullet for hyperthermia procedures. The colored spheres depict nonlinear acoustic waves traveling within sphere chains. The curvature of the wavefront is induced by precompressing each row, and is used to generate appropriate time delays to focus acoustic energy at a desired focal point. The stylized image depicts a sound bullet superimposed onto a brain MR image provided by Mike Tyszka of the California Institute of Technology Brain Imaging Center.
The nonlinear acoustic lens was developed by Chiara Daraio, assistant professor of aeronautics and applied physics at Caltech, and postdoctoral scholar Alessandro Spadoni. The lens and its sound bullets have the potential to revolutionize applications from medical imaging and therapy to the nondestructive evaluation of materials and engineering systems.
To learn more about this research, see the Caltech press release,
"Caltech Researchers Create 'Sound Bullets.'" [Research supported by National Science Foundation grant CMMI 08-44540.] (Date of Image: 2010)
Credit: Spadoni and Daraio/Caltech
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