Prepare to have your mind blown! Remember the famous tagline from the classic film “Alien” – “In space, no one can hear you scream”? Well, it turns out that might not be entirely true! Physicists Zhuoran Geng and Ilari Maasilta from the Nanoscience Center at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, have made an incredible discovery. They have shown that sound can actually travel across a vacuum region in certain situations. Yes, you read that right – sound in space!
But how is this possible? In a recent article published in Communications Physics, Geng and Maasilta explain that sound waves can “tunnel” across a vacuum gap between two solids, as long as those solids are piezoelectric. These special materials not only vibrate in response to sound waves, but also produce an electrical response. And since an electric field can exist in a vacuum, it can transmit the sound waves. It’s like something out of a sci-fi movie!
There is one condition for this mind-blowing phenomenon to occur – the size of the gap must be smaller than the wavelength of the sound wave. This mind-boggling effect works not only in the audio range of frequencies, but also in ultrasound and hypersound frequencies. The only requirement is that the vacuum gap gets smaller as the frequencies increase. It’s like a secret passage for sound!
Professor Ilari Maasilta, one of the researchers involved in this mind-bending study, explains, “In most cases, the effect is small. However, we have also discovered situations where the full energy of the wave jumps across the vacuum with 100% efficiency, without any reflections. This mind-blowing discovery could have applications in microelectromechanical components (MEMS) and smartphone technology, as well as in heat control. The possibilities are endless!”
