Thaindian News

Washington, Mar 9 (ANI): According to a new study, quantum mechanics may hold the answer to an age-old question: How long does a tuning fork ring?

When the strings of an instrument like a guitar are plucked, the vibrations create acoustic waves that we hear as sound.

The purity of the emitted tone is intimately related to the decay of the vibration amplitude, that is, the mechanical losses (Q) of the system.

The larger Q, the purer the tone and the longer the system will vibrate before the sound damps out.

For many applications it is necessary to minimize the mechanical loss. However, it had previously remained a challenge to make numerical predictions of the attainable Q for even relatively straightforward geometries.

Researchers from Vienna and Munich have attained a solution by developing a finite-element-based numerical solver that is capable of predicting the design-limited damping of almost arbitrary mechanical resonators.

“We calculate how elementary mechanical excitations, or phonons, radiate from the mechanical resonator into the supports of the device”, says Garrett Cole.

The idea goes back to a previous work by Ignacio Wilson-Rae, physicist at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen. In collaboration with the Vienna group the team managed to come up with a numerical solution to compute this radiation in a simple manner that works on any standard PC.

The predictive power of the numerical Q-solver removes the guesswork that is currently involved (e.g., trial and error prototype fabrication) in the design of resonant mechanical structures.

The researchers point out that their “Q-solver” is scale independent and thus can be applied to a wide range of scenarios, from nanoscale devices all the way up to macroscopic systems. (ANI)