Sound damping in ferrofluids: Magnetically enhanced compressional viscosity

The damping of sound waves in magnetized ferrofluids is investigated and shown to be considerably higher than in the nonmagnetized case. This fact may be interpreted as a field-enhanced, effective compressional viscosity-in analogy to the ubiquitous field-enhanced shear viscosity that is known to be the reason for many unusual behaviors of ferrofluids under shear.