Bubble formation plays an important role in industries concerned with mineral flotation, food, cosmetics, and materials, which requires additional energy to produce the liquid–gas interfaces. A naturally observed fact is, owing to the effect of surface tension, a bubble film tends to retract to reduce its surface area. Here we show a “reverse” phenomenon whereby a drop is transformed into a bubble using acoustic levitation via acoustic resonance. Once the volume of the cavity encapsulated by the buckled film reaches a critical value V*, resonance occurs and an abrupt inflation is triggered, leading to the formation of a closed bubble. Experiments and simulations both reveal that V* decreases with increasing acoustic frequency, which agrees well with acoustic resonance theory. The results afford enlightening insights into acoustic resonance and highlight its role in manipulating buckled fluid–fluid interfaces, providing a reference for fabricating unique core–shell-like materials.

Droplets suspended by acoustic levitation provide genuine substrate-free environments for understanding unconventional fluid dynamics, evaporation kinetics, and chemical reactions by circumventing solid surface and boundary effects. Using a fully levitated air−water interface by acoustic levitation in conjunction with drying-mediated nanoparticle self-assembly, here, we demonstrate a general approach to fabricating free-standing nanoassemblies, which can totally avoid solid surface effects during the entire process. This strategy has no limitation for the sizes or shapes of constituent metallic nanoparticle building blocks and can also be applied to fabricate freestanding bilayered and trilayered nanoassemblies or even threedimensional hollow nanoassemblies. We believe that our strategy may be further extended to quantum dots, magnetic particles, colloids, etc. Hence, it may lead to a myriad of homogeneous or heterogeneous free-standing nanoassemblies with programmable functionalities.

In this study, we investigated the shape evolution and bubble formation of acoustically levitated drops upon increasing the sound intensity. Here, a levitated liquid drop evolves progressively from an oblate spheroidal shape to a flattened film to a thin bowl-shaped film, eventually forming a closed bubble. Through systematic experiments, numerical simulation and scaling analysis, we demonstrate that the buckled geometry of the liquid film can drastically enhance the suction effect of acoustic radiation pressure at its rim, forming a significant pressure gradient inside the film which causes an abrupt area expansion and bubble formation. Our results provide the mechanical origin responsible for the shape evolution and bubble formation of acoustically levitated drops, and highlight the role of buckled geometry in the levitation and manipulation of liquid films in an ultrasound field.

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The superposition dynamics of two confronting ultrasonic waves and their levitation capability for centimeter-sized thin disks are investigated by numerical analyses and validated by experiments. The sound pressure simulation reveals that two opposite ultrasonic waves provide a more effective standing-wave field than a single ultrasonic wave when the diameter of disk-shaped object approaches the wavelength scale. The dynamic superposition of two confronting beams facilitates the acoustic levitation of the clay disk and aluminum disk with diameters of 0.97𝜆 and 0.90𝜆. The acoustic radiation forces exerting on these thin disks are measured experimentally, which exhibit a better levitation stability for the centimeter-sized thin disks. The equilibrium levitation positions of the two disks are located near the sound pressure node, and the maximum acoustic radiation pressure on their surfaces is less than one percent of the maximum sound pressure.