Chaos in 1D Acoustically Bound Clusters

Acoustic fields can produce trapping forces on single particles, analogous to the optical trapping effect.

However, sound can also induce forces between particles due to multiple scattering events.

This inter-particle force -- which we refer to as acoustic binding -- can be used to guide the long-range assembly and dynamics of particles on wavelength scales.

Here we will discuss non-reciprocal forces which arise from many body interactions in a 1D system of particles suspended along the propagation axis of an acoustic standing wave.

We find that the multibody interactions generate chaotic behavior, even within these simple configurations, and we quantify the fractal dimension of this chaos using a correlation integral analysis.