  From air-sea gas exchange, oil pollution, to bioreactors, the ubiquitous
fragmentation of bubbles/drops in turbulence has been modelled by relying on
the classical Kolmogorov-Hinze paradigm since the 1950s. This framework
hypothesizes that bubbles/drops are broken solely by eddies of the same size,
even though turbulence is well known for its wide spectrum of scales. Here, by
designing an experiment that can physically and cleanly disentangle eddies of
various sizes, we report the experimental evidence to challenge this hypothesis
and show bubbles are preferentially broken by the sub-bubble-scale eddies. Our
work also highlights that fragmentation cannot be quantified solely by the
stress criterion or the Weber number; The competition between different time
scales is equally important. Instead of being elongated slowly and persistently
by flows at their own scales, bubbles are fragmented in turbulence by small
eddies via a burst of intense local deformation within a short time.
