Stability control of single bubble sonoluminescence light

A micron-sized water bubble can be held fixed in a glass flask using an ult rasonic pressure field, and can be made to emit picosecond pulses of light that contains all colors. This phenomenon is called single bubble sonolumin escence (SBSL). The late Prof. Julian Schwinger had put forth a possible ca use for SBSL, and postulated that the SBSL light consisted of photons that are emitted in pairs. Prior to testing for Schwinger's idea of photon pairs , we conducted experiments to measure the intensity fluctuations in SBSL us ing single-photon counting. By controlling the relative phase between the d rive and feedback signals, through a PC computer, a light-emitting water bu bble in an acoustically resonant flask could be maintained, while the fluct uations in the single-photon counts were Limited to the square root of the number of detected photons. We demonstrate the possibility of maintaining a long-term stabilized sonoluminescence bubble, while simultaneously keeping the bubble light intensity at the level of single-photon sensitivity. Our results explicitly show that sonoluminescence light can be stabilized for e xperimental investigations that test for possible photon pairs from SBSL. ( C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.