Monday 21 January 2019

thermodynamics - What is the minimum pressure of a medium for which a sound wave can exist?


At what pressure will be particles in a medium be unable to form a sound wave when disturbed? How can this pressure be described mathematically?


My guess is that this would correspond to the point at which the restoring force due to pressure is unable to create a transverse wave and the disturbed particles travel infinitely far away before the hypothetical wave reaches it's amplitude. But I have no idea how you would even begin to start finding a quantitative value for this point.



Answer



It's obviously not a sharp cut-off, but as a general guide sound waves cannot propagate if their wavelength is equal to or less than the mean free path of the gas molecules. This means that even for arbitrarily low pressures sound will still propagate provided the wavelength is long enough. Possibly this is stretching a point, but even in interstellar gas clouds sound waves (more precisely shock waves) will propagate, but their length scale is on the order of light years.


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