Design of acoustic diffraction plates for manipulating ultrasound in liquid Helium

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel acoustic diffraction plate design for liquid Helium that enhances ultrasound manipulation, enabling precise control over ultrasonic pressure and bubble formation for advanced experimental applications.

Contribution

Introduction of acoustic diffraction plates for liquid Helium that allow adjustable ultrasonic focusing and control over bubble generation, surpassing limitations of traditional transducers.

Findings

Enhanced ultrasonic pressure at multiple, movable foci.

Controlled generation of multi-electron bubbles.

Ability to tune ultrasound focus and surface instabilities via frequency.

Abstract

Many experiments in liquid Helium, such as the optical imaging of exploding electron bubbles, which enables research on individual particles under applied conditions, involve the usage of ultrasound generated by piezoelectric transducers. Previous studies either use planar transducers, which limits the maximum sound intensity and the spatial resolution, or curved transducers, which only allow observations at fixed foci and make it difficult to apply uniform electric fields. In this paper, we introduce the usage of acoustic diffraction plates in liquid Helium to amplify ultrasonic pressure oscillations at an arbitrary set of primary foci coupled with large counts of secondary foci, all of which can be freely moved around by changing the ultrasound frequency. The frequency dependence also allows us to generate controlled Faraday instabilities at the surface, which enables the generation of multi-electron bubbles with desired parameters.