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What is the ultimate speed of sound transmission?

What is the ultimate speed of sound transmission?

BY Christine,Einstein 10 Nov,2020 Sound Transmission

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In hard solids, such as diamonds, sound travels even faster. When seismic waves pass through the mantle, we get information about the earth's internal information. We can even get to know the inside of stars based on this theory.

Chris Pickard, the material scientist from University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom says, “Sound waves in solids have become very important in many fields,”. Seismologists use seismic waves to analyse the nature of seismic events and the structure of the internal earth. Materials scientists are also interested in sound waves in solids because it is related to the important elastic characteristics, which includes resistance to pressure.”

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So, we want to figure out the speed limit of sound. A team of scientists from Queen Mary University of London, The University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and the Russian Institute of High- pressure Physics found that the speed of sound depends on two fundamental constants.

One is the fine structure constant, which represents the strength of electromagnetic interactions between fundamentally charged particles. The other one is the proton to electron mass ratio, which is the proton mass divided by the electron mass.

“Fine-structure constants and fine-tuning values of the proton-electron mass ratio, as well as the balance between them, control nuclear reactions, such as proton decay and nuclear fusion in stars, leading to the formation of essential chemical elements; This balance provides a narrow “habitable zone” in space from which stars and planets, and even the molecular structure of life originate. We declare that a simple combination of the fine structure constant and the proton-electron mass ratio results in another dimensionless quantity that characterizes a key property of the condensed phase -- the velocity of wave propagation in solid and liquid, or the velocity of sound.”


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