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Nature 398, 378-379 (1 April 1999) | doi:10.1038/18786

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Sonoluminescence:  And there was light!

Robert Apfel1

It took ten years, but on page 402 of this issue Hilgenfeldt et al.1 are able to explain the tiny dot of light emanating from a solitary, sonically driven bubble, first observed by Felipe Gaitan in 1989. Gaitan had been adjusting the parameters in his apparatus to study a new regime for acoustically levitating a bubble in water — a technique perfected almost three decades before by his PhD advisor, Lawrence Crum — and was surprised to find the bubble emitting what appeared to be a continuous dot of light.

  1. Robert Apfel is in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Yale University, 9 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8286, USA.
    e-mail: Email: robert.apfel@yale.edu