Oval window Oval window The oval window (or fenestra vestibuli) is a membrane-covered opening that leads from the middle ear to the vestibule of the inner ear. Vibrations that contact the tympanic membrane travel through the three ossicles and into the inner ear. The oval window is the intersection of the middle ear with the inner ear and is directly contacted by the stapes; by the time vibrations reach the oval window, they have been amplified over 10 times from what they were when they contacted the tympanic membrane, a testament to the amplifying power of the middle ear. It is a
Dirac membrane Dirac membrane A model of a charged membrane introduced by Paul Dirac in 1962. Dirac's original motivation was to explain the mass of the muon as an excitation of the ground state corresponding to an electron. Anticipating the birth of string theory by almost a decade, he was the first to introduce what is now called a type of Nambu–Goto action for membranes. In the Dirac membrane model the repulsive electromagnetic forces on the membrane are balanced by the contracting ones coming from the positive tension. In the case of the spherical membrane, classical equations of motion imply that the