Sonoluminescence, shock waves, and micro-thermonuclear fusion

We have performed numerical hydrodynamic simulations of the growth and collapse of a sonoluminescing bubble in a liquid. Our calculations show that spherically converging shock waves are generated during the collapse of the bubble. The combination of the shock waves and a realistic equation of state for the gas in the bubble provides an explanation for the measured picosecond optical pulse widths and indicates that the temperatures near the center of the bubble may exceed 3O eV. This leads naturally to speculation about obtaining micro-thermonuclear fusion in a bubble filled with deuterium (D{sub 2}) gas. Consequently, we performed numerical simulations of the collapse of a D{sub 2} bubble in D{sub 2}0. A pressure spike added to the periodic driving amplitude creates temperatures that may be sufficient to generate a very small, but measurable number of thermonuclear D-D fusion reactions in the bubble