Splash!

Photographs of a liquid drop hitting a smooth dry substrate.

The top row shows four frames from a movie of an alcohol drop hitting a dry glass slide in a background of air at atmospheric pressure. The drop, after impact, spreads and creates a corona which eventually breaks up into a splash of smaller droplets. As the pressure of the gas is reduced (second row) the amount of splashing is reduced, and below a threshold pressure (third and fourth rows), no droplets are emitted and no splashing occurs (L Xu et al. 2005 arXiv.org/abs/physics/0501149).

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