Segregation in water-based stable single-bubble sonoluminescence

A long-standing issue in the field of long-time-stable, water-based, single-bubble sonoluminescence has been the close similarity of the spectra to that of blackbody radiation, the question being whether the similarity is just a weird coincidence, with the bubbles being, on the whole, transparent to their own radiation. One mechanism that has been suggested is the generation of a shock or, at least, a compression wave in the gas of the bubble. A footprint of such a wave would be segregation of species. We have investigated spectra from bubbles seeded with various mixtures of helium or neon with xenon or argon using a transformation, specific to our experimental setup and spectrometer, that was shown to allow for a single-parameter characterization of the spectra in some simpler situations. The surprising result of this investigation is that although no trace of segregation is found, the radiation seems to be highly thermalized in all cases.