A team of researchers from the University of Tokyo, Kyusyu University and RIKEN in Japan can explain the physics of champagne bubbles.

Pressure builds very quickly when one uncorks a bottle of champagne. Bubbles form as the champagne is forced out of the bottle. These bubbles grow larger and larger in a fundamental non-equilibrium phenomenon known as "Ostwald ripening."

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This is a widely observed occurrence also found in systems including foams and spin systems.

So that is what the team of researchers set out to discover. They put virtual molecules in a container and assigned each of them initial velocities. This in order to observe how they continue moving to determine their individual positions over time.

Reserchers encountered many challenges doing this, according to University of Tokyo research scientists Hiroshi Watanabe.

"A huge number of molecules, however, are necessary to simulate bubbles - on the order of 10,000 are required to express a bubble. So we needed at least this many to investigate hundreds of millions of molecules - a feat not possible on a single computer," said Hiroshi Watanabe, a research associate at the University of Tokyo's Institute for Solid State Physics.

The result was 700 million particles being simulated through the use of 4,000 processors on the K computer.

"In the past, while many researchers wanted to explore bubble nuclei from the molecular level, it was difficult because of a lack of computational power," Watanabe said.

"But now, several petascale computers -- systems capable of reaching performance in excess of one quadrillion point operations per second -- are available around the world, which enable huge simulations."

TagsChampagne Bubbles, Champagne, physics, uncorking champagne bottle