Oscillations of soap bubbles

Oscillations of droplets or bubbles of a confined fluid in a fluid environment are found in various situations in everyday life, in technological processing and in natural phenomena on different length scales. Air bubbles in liquids or liquid droplets in air are well-known examples. Soap bubbles represent a particularly simple, beautiful and attractive system to study the dynamics of a closed gas volume embedded in the same or a different gas. Their dynamics is governed by the densities and viscosities of the gases and by the film tension. Dynamic equations describing their oscillations under simplifying assumptions have been well known since the beginning of the 20th century. Both analytical description and numerical modeling have made considerable progress since then, but quantitative experiments have been lacking so far. On the other hand, a soap bubble represents an easily manageable paradigm for the study of oscillations of fluid spheres. We use a technique to create axisymmetric initial non-equilibrium states, and we observe damped oscillations into equilibrium by means of a fast video camera. Symmetries of the oscillations, frequencies and damping rates of the eigenmodes as well as the coupling of modes are analyzed. They are compared to analytical models from the literature and to numerical calculations from the literature and this work.