A world-famous light experiment from 1801 has now been carried out with sound for the first time. Research by physicists in Leiden has produced new insights that could be applied in 5G devices and the emerging field of quantum acoustics. The study is published in the journal Optics Letters.

Ph.D. student Thomas Steenbergen says, “We saw that sound waves in materials behave in the same way as light, but also slightly differently. With a mathematical model, we can now explain and predict this behavior.”