Longest lasting antibubble

The longest lasting antibuble remained intact for around 13 hours in an experiment conducted by a team of scientists from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, along with Stéphane Dorbolo from the University of Liège in Belgium. The results of this research were published in Physical Review Fluids on 27 June 2022.

A conventional bubble is a thin layer of liquid that encloses a gas, such as air, within it. By contrast, an “antibubble” is a thin layer of gas that encases a liquid while fully immersed in liquid itself. They have long attracted the interest of industrial chemists because they would enable a novel method of mixing chemicals. However their short and unpredictable lifetimes – generally less than a minute – have made them unsuitable for any practical applications.

These long-lived antibubbles were created by immersing antibubbles in a liquid bath and shaking it up and down. Shake at just the right frequency and the antibubbles survive for hours. As soon as the vibration stops, though, they pop. This is a particularly interesting development as it not only allows antibubbles to be held in suspension indefinitely, but also for the exact moment that they pop to be precisely controlled.