Nanobubble nucleation by pulsed laser illumination of colloidal gold nanoparticles.

This study expands upon a technique our team previously developed for generating nanobubbles on demand with a collimated pulsed laser beam. This work highlights how the controlled addition of gold nanoparticles enhances nanobubble generation efficiency in water, even at laser intensities well below the threshold for multiphoton ionization. Specifically, we investigated the influence of nanoparticles of three distinct sizes on the laser fluence threshold for bubble nucleation and the lifetime of the resultant nanobubbles.

Micro-jet formation induced by the interaction of a spherical and toroidal cavitation bubble.

We investigate experimentally and numerically the interaction between a spherical cavitation bubble and a wall-bounded toroidal cavitation bubble. We demonstrate that shock wave focusing following toroidal bubble initiation induces the formation of micro-jets that pierce the spherical bubble in the torus-axis direction away from the surface, strongest in the anti-phase scenario. The velocity of micro-jets is determined by the initial standoff distance of the spherical bubble from the wall and thus from the toroidal bubble, with peak jet velocities approaching 1000m/s.

Development of MHz X-ray phase contrast imaging at the European XFEL.

We report on recent developments that enable megahertz hard X-ray phase contrast imaging (MHz XPCI) experiments at the Single Particles, Clusters, and Biomolecules and Serial Femtosecond Crystallography (SPB/SFX) instrument of the European XFEL facility (EuXFEL). We describe the technical implementation of the key components, including an MHz fast camera and a modular indirect X-ray microscope system based on fast scintillators coupled through a high-resolution optical microscope, which enable full-field X-ray microscopy with phase contrast of fast and irreversible phenomena. The image quality for MHz XPCI data showed significant improvement compared with a pilot demonstration of the technique using parallel beam illumination, which also allows access to up to 24 keV photon energies at the SPB/SFX instrument of the EuXFEL.

Optic generation and perpetuation of acoustic bubble clusters.

Laser-induced cavitation bubbles offer precise control of the flow in space and time, but they are rarely used for the mechanical and chemical processing of liquids. Instead, strong acoustic fields are commonly used to nucleate and drive cavitation bubbles for liquid process applications. While acoustic field creates many more cavitation events, the resulting chaotic dynamics offers little control on the fluid mechanics, i.