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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday June 21 2017, @11:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the sounds-about-right dept.

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) demonstrated how particles, floating on top of a glycerin-water solution, synchronize in response to acoustic waves blasted from a computer speaker.

The study, published today (Monday, June 19) in the journal Nature Materials, could help address fundamental questions about energy dissipation and how it allows living and nonliving systems to adapt to their environment when they are out of thermodynamic equilibrium.

[...] "We show that individually 'dumb' particles can self-organize far from equilibrium by dissipating energy and emerge with a collective trait that is dynamically adaptive to and reflective of their environment," said study co-lead author Chad Ropp, a postdoctoral researcher in Zhang's group. "In this case, the particles followed the 'beat' of a sound wave generated from a computer speaker."

Notably, after the researchers intentionally broke up the particle party, the pieces would reassemble, showing a capacity to self-heal.

Ropp noted that this work could eventually lead to a wide variety of "smart" applications, such as adaptive camouflage that responds to sound and light waves, or blank-slate materials whose properties are written on demand by externally controlled drives.

[...] As the sound waves traveled at a frequency of 4 kilohertz, the scattering particles moved along at about 1 centimeter per minute. Within 10 minutes, the collective pattern of the particles emerged, where the distance between the particles was surprisingly non-uniform. The researchers found that the self-assembled particles exhibited a phononic bandgap -- a frequency range in which acoustic waves cannot pass -- whose edge was inextricably linked, or "enslaved," to the 4 kHz input.

Journal Reference:
Nicolas Bachelard, Chad Ropp, Marc Dubois, Rongkuo Zhao, Yuan Wang, Xiang Zhang. Emergence of an enslaved phononic bandgap in a non-equilibrium pseudo-crystal. Nature Materials, 2017; DOI: 10.1038/nmat4920


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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday June 22 2017, @12:30PM (3 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Thursday June 22 2017, @12:30PM (#529476) Journal

    OK but the phononic bandgap thingie, if I understood it correctly, seems more like an instance of the force/reaction duality we are used to witness elsewhere a lot.

    As I understood it, scream at 4000hz loud enough and the particles will arrange in a complex manner to DAMPEN the 4khz frequency itself.

    In other words, the particles cover their ears in a coordinated, elegant, WTF STFU.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @04:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @04:19PM (#529548)

    > DAMPEN

    Really? The particles throw water at the 4KHz scream?
        Damp & damping = remove energy from a system
        Dampen & dampening = make wet
    Sorry, it's a pet peeve.

  • (Score: 2) by KGIII on Thursday June 22 2017, @04:58PM (1 child)

    by KGIII (5261) on Thursday June 22 2017, @04:58PM (#529570) Journal

    You say it as if they have a purpose for it. They don't.

    When you throw a ball, it takes the only path it can take.

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    "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday June 23 2017, @04:26AM

      by Bot (3902) on Friday June 23 2017, @04:26AM (#529829) Journal

      I was ironic in the latter part of the comment, and there is no need to assign purpose or agency to particles. We witness similar phenomenons with action/reaction forces. Send 4khz, expect configuration damping 4khz.

      Any aspect of an universe is ultimately arbitrary for those whose POV is in the same universe, and that's totally inconclusive wrt the origin of those aspects, so, relax.

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