Plasma in sonoluminescing bubble.

With the new accommodation coefficient of water vapor evaluated by molecular dynamics model, the maximum temperature of a sonoluminescing bubble calculated with the full partial differential equations easily reaches few tens of thousands degrees. Though at this temperature the gas is weakly ionized (10% or less), the gas density inside a sonoluminescing bubble at the moment of the bubble's flashing is so high that there still forms a dense plasma. The light emission of the bubble is calculated by the plasma model which is compared with that by the bremsstrahlung (electron-ion, electron-neutral atom) and recombination model. The calculation by the two models shows that for the relatively low maximum temperature (< 30,000 K) of the bubble, the pulse width is independent of the wavelength and the spectrum deviates the black body radiation type; while for the relatively high maximum temperature (approximately 60,000 K), the pulse width is dependent of the wavelength and the spectrum is an almost perfect black body radiation spectrum. The maximum temperature calculated by the gas dynamics equations is much higher than the temperature fitted by the black body radiation formula.