{"id":226334,"date":"2025-12-02T21:03:40","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T03:03:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/physicists-overcome-fundamental-limitation-of-acoustic-levitation"},"modified":"2025-12-02T21:03:40","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T03:03:40","slug":"physicists-overcome-fundamental-limitation-of-acoustic-levitation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/physicists-overcome-fundamental-limitation-of-acoustic-levitation","title":{"rendered":"Physicists overcome fundamental limitation of acoustic levitation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/physicists-overcome-fundamental-limitation-of-acoustic-levitation2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Using sound to get objects to float works well if a single particle is levitated, but it causes multiple particles to collapse into a clump in mid-air. Physicists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) have now found a way to keep them apart using charge. Their findings, <a href=\"https:\/\/pnas.org\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.2516865122\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/i>, could find applications in materials science, robotics, and microengineering.<\/p>\n<p>Who hasn\u2019t dreamed of overcoming gravity and getting objects to hover above ground?<\/p>\n<p>In 2013, Scott Waitukaitis, now an assistant professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), became interested in using acoustic levitation as a tool to study various physical phenomena. At that time, only a handful of research groups were using this technique for similar purposes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Using sound to get objects to float works well if a single particle is levitated, but it causes multiple particles to collapse into a clump in mid-air. Physicists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) have now found a way to keep them apart using charge. Their findings, published in Proceedings of the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226334\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}