According to the creators, this is the loudest of the existing underwater sounds. It is so powerful that when a sound wave comes into contact with water, the latter can evaporate, writes “Around the World”. In fact, it is a sound made by a tiny stream of water (as wide as half a human hair) when struck with an even thinner X-ray laser. You cannot hear this sound because it was created in a vacuum chamber. This is probably for the better, considering that at 270 dB these thundering shock waves sound deafer than the loudest NASA rocket launch (about 205 decibels).

However, the microscopic destructive effects of sound can be seen in action thanks to a series of ultra-slow motion videos recorded at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, as part of a new study.

The video was shot in about 40 nanoseconds (40 billionths of a second). A pulsating laser instantly splits a jet of water into two parts, evaporating the liquid it touches, and sending powerful shock waves on either side of the jet. These waves create other waves, and after about 10 nanoseconds on each side of the “crack,” hissing black clouds form from collapsing bubbles.

According to Claudiu Stan , a physicist at Rutgers University in New Jersey and one of the co-authors of the study, these shock waves are the loudest underwater sound. If he were a little more powerful, he would have evaporated all the water in his area of ​​operation, and then the sound simply would not have the medium to spread.

Why try to produce a sound that destroys its own environment? According to Stan, understanding the limits of underwater sound can help researchers design future experiments.

Scientists regularly place tiny particles of poorly studied matter (for example, protein crystals) in liquid jets and use lasers to determine their chemical properties.

According to Stan, if scientists know exactly how intense a laser pulse can be, this can improve the process of conducting experiments.