Space and Physics
PUBLISHED
Students at the University of Exeter in the UK have broken a peculiar world record: levitating a soap bubble for 84 minutes, beating the previous record by over an hour. They created the bubble using an acoustic levitation device, a machine that can make small objects float in midair thanks to ultrasound.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.These devices can be used to keep small objects suspended and also to manipulate them, which is how the team employed it. They used the acoustic levitator to hold a water-and-soap droplet a few millimeters across, flattened it, and then turned it into a bubble.
The bubble was kept leviating for one hour and 24 minutes. That’s over an hour more than the previous record of 23 minutes and 36 seconds achieved by Ji Xiaoliang and Zang Duyang at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'an in 2023.
Students Boden Duffy and Joe Nightingale have broken the incredibly specific "longest-lasting bubble in acoustic levitation" record as part of their final-year project, which focused on understanding oscillations in bubbles.
“We found that a lot of people have used the acoustic levitator to study droplets but not the bubbles it can create,” Nightingale said in a statement. “We’ve based our project on some of those research papers we’ve found. We’re trying to replicate some of those experiments with bubbles to see if we can get the same results or find something new.”
The crucial realization that turned this project into a record-breaking attempt, was when the student duo realized that they were good at creating and keeping bubbles.
“Once we’d formed a bubble, it just sort of happened,” Duffy said describing the process. “The hardest part is probably setting it all up,” added Nightingale.
Just making long-lasting bubbles might not be a revolutionary approach but it showed that acoustic levitators are versatile devices that keep delivering surprises.
“They’re useful in many fields, used in manufacturing microchips as well as scientific research where small insects, cells or droplets can be levitated under a microscope for observation,” Dr Chris Brunt added.
The bubble’s 84-minute life was witnessed by a group of people and filmed. The footage has now been sent to the Guinness World Records for official verification.
