Liquid Smoke Rings Inspired By Dolphins
“The vortex knot was a mere theory a century ago, but now physicists at the University of Chicago have created a vortex knot in a lab environment for the first time,” Science World Report notes.
“The gnarly feat,” says Nature, “described today in Nature Physics, paves the way for scientists to experimentally study twists and turns in a range of phenomena – ionized gases like that of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, superconductive materials, liquid crystals and quantum fields that describe elementary particles.”
“To conduct the study, the physicists used a 3-D printer to make small replicas of airplane foil wings,” iTechPost reports.
“They then submerged them in water and yanked them forward very quickly. Water filled the space left by the airfoil, and since the airfoil was knot-shaped, the liquid vortex took the same shape. Although the vortex knot was only visible momentarily, the scientists captured it with video using a high-speed laser scanner. The success of the project means that scientists should now be able to create the knotted vortex as they see fit for experimental purposes.”
“Vortex knots should, in principle, be persistent, stable phenomena,” researchers say.
“‘The unexpected thing is that they’re not,’ said Dustin Kleckner, a postdoctoral scientist at UChicago’s James Franck Institute. ‘They seem to break up in a particular way. They stretch themselves, which is a weird behavior.'”
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Posted on March 5, 2013