Sustainable pulling motion of an active scatterer

TL;DR

This paper proposes a technique to generate a sustainable attractive pulling motion of active spherical scatterers in acoustic fields by controlling phase differences between excitation modes, enabling negative average radiation force.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to produce negative average acoustic radiation force on active scatterers through phase-controlled dual-mode excitation, ensuring attractive net motion.

Findings

Controlled phase differences can produce negative average radiation force.

The method guarantees no positive force in the entire wavelength for specific phase settings.

The technique enables sustained attractive motion of active particles in acoustic fields.

Abstract

In this paper, we concern the generation of attractive net motion with respect to the location of external wave source for active spherical carriers. Here we recall that the exerted acoustic radiation force in an acoustic field, resulting from an incident wave, a scattered wave, and the radiated wave from the active carrier, can be positive, negative or zero based on the location of the object in the field. Thus in a general case, a sustainable pulling motion is not guaranteed. In this work, by considering the point that the average of the radiation force for an object, active in a single mode, over a complete wavelength is equal to the radiation force applied to a passive object (which is always positive), we put forward a technique to generate the acoustic radiation force with negative average over a complete wavelength to ensure that the net motion is attractive. The idea here is a simultaneous excitation of the object in two modes of breathing and first, with a difference in the phase of excitations. We will also show that by controlling the phase difference, the average of the force exerted on the object can be positive, negative or zero. Moreover, we show that for specific phase differences not only the average of the force is negative but also the force itself never experiences a positive value in a whole wavelength at those phase differences, which this can be a desired state to achieve a perfect negative net motion.