Suppressing dissociation in sonoluminescing bubbles: The effect of excluded volume

Recent theoretical work in single-bubble sonoluminescence has suggested that water vapor in the collapsing bubble leads to energy-consuming chemical reactions, restricting the peak temperatures to values for which hardly any light emission could occur. Analyzing the reaction thermodynamics within the dense, collapsed bubble, we demonstrate that the excluded volume of the nonideal gas results in pronounced suppression of the particle-producing endothermic reactions. Thus, sufficiently high temperatures for considerable bremsstrahlung emission can be achieved.