Innovative Acoustic Techniques for Studying New Materials and New Developments inSolid State Physics (Includes ASSERT)

摘要

The goals of this project involve the use of innovative acoustic techniques tostudy new materials and new developments in solid state physics. Major accomplishments include (a) the publication of two papers in the prestigious journal Phys. Rev. Lett.: one on the use of resonant ultrasound spectroscopy (RUS) to determine the isotropy of a quasicrystal, and one on the behavior of nonlinear pulses propagating in disordered media, (b) the publication of an article on RUS in the magazine Physics Today, (c) the study of problems with the RUS analysis technique, (d) the verification of the high information content of the data, higher than expected, in the fracture experiment, which led to a significant expansion of the fracture facility, and (e) the observation of some exciting results which show that a wide range of fluid parameters, and significantly different acoustic signals, may be obtained in liquid coalescence experiments using normal liquid helium.