Data collapse of the spectra of water-based stable single-bubble sonoluminescence

In the early days of stable single-bubble sonoluminescence, it was strongly debated whether the emission was blackbody radiation or whether the bubble was transparent to its own radiation (volume emission). Presently, the volume emission picture is nearly universally accepted. We present new measurements of spectra with apparent color temperatures ranging from 6000 to 21 000 K. We show through data collapse that within experimental uncertainty, apart from a constant, the spectra of strongly driven stable single-bubble sonoluminescence in water can be written as the product between a universal function of wavelength and a functional form that only depends on wavelength and apparent temperature but has no reference to any other parameter specific to the experimental situation. This remarkable result does question our theoretical understanding of the state of the plasma in the interior of strongly driven stable sonoluminescent bubbles.