When you speak softly in one of the galleries of St Paul’s cathedral, the sound runs so easily around the dome that visitors anywhere on its circumference can hear it. This striking phenomenon has been termed the ‘whispering gallery’ effect, and variants of it appear in many scenarios where a wave can travel nearly perfectly around a structure. Researchers from the University of Göttingen have now harnessed the effect to control the beam of an electron microscope by light. The results were published in Nature.
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