Sound-mediated stable configurations for polystyrene particles.

Here we report an experimental observation of the self-organization effect of polystyrene particles formed by acoustically induced interaction forces. Two types of stable configurations are observed experimentally: one is mechanically equilibrium and featured by nonzero interparticle separations, and the other corresponds to a closely packed assembly, which is created by strong attractions among the aggregated particles. For the former case involving two or three particles, the most probable interparticle separations (counted for numerous independent initial arrangements) agree well with the theoretical predictions. For the latter case, the number of the final stable configurations grows with the particle number, and the occurrence probability of each configuration is interpreted by a simple geometric model.