Does Sound Have Mass? It Seems That It Does

New research shows that when a sound wave spreads through an environment it carries mas. And if we want to weight them, we could use sound waves in a Bose-Einstein condensate or perhaps the sound waves created by earthquakes that could weight billions of kilograms.

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During the last summer, a trio of theoretical physicists published a study that shook physics. They claimed that sound has mass. And not only they did claim it has mass, more specifically they said it has negative mass making it move slightly against gravity. While not everyone agreed with them, they certainly got the attention of the world of physics.

Now, Angelo Esposito, Rafael Krichevsky and Alberto Nicolis from the Columbia University in New York are coming back into the spotlight. In a new study published by the Physical Review Letters journal, they used the effective field theory to confirm their theory about sound with mass.

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For many years, physicists knew that sound waves have energy. But they never really thought about sound waves having mass as well. There was no true reason to believe that sound waves generate any gravitational fields. But last year the situation changed when scientists used the quantum field theory to show that sound waves moving through superliquid helium have a tiny mass. They found that phonons – quasiparticles of sound – that spread the vibrational quantum in a crystal matrix interact with the gravitational field in a way that they just have to have mass.

In the new study, the scientists show that their previous observations from which they deduced that sound waves have mass can be extended to most materials. Using the effective field theory they calculated that when a one-watt sound wave moves in water for one second it should have a weight of around 0.1 milligram.

Sources:

• https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.084501
• https://phys.org/news/2019-03-evidence-mass.html

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