Towards High-Fidelity Exascale Smulation of Sonoluminescence

Sonoluminescence is a physical process by which sound waves can cause a gas bubble to collapse so rapidly that it reaches extremely high temperatures and emits light.  This phenomenon is found in nature (e.g., the snapping shrimp) and has various potential engineering applications.

The complete physics of sonoluminescence is not yet fully understood (though substantial theoretical progress has been achieved over the past several decades).  Numerical simulation of sonoluminescence can help scientists more easily explore this phenomenon and can help provide validation of experiments.

The specific goal of this project is to develop a molecular dynamics simulation code for sonoluminescence that can potentially scale to run on exascale computers (e.g., the latest supercomputers at U.S. national laboratories).  Simulations from this code would represent the largest-scale numerical results obtained for sonoluminescence to date.  The code could be used by physics researchers to further study and explore this fascinating phenomenon.