A laser show in a soap bubble

July 1, 2020 10:07 AM

Rare 'branched flow' phenomenon seen for the first time in visible light. "For the first time, researchers have created the 'branched flow' phenomenon in visible light, previously only seen in other types of wave like sound. Using nothing but a laser and a simple soap bubble, scientists caused light to twist and fork along its path."
posted by dhruva (10 comments total)

That is so fucking cool.
posted by notsnot at 11:38 AM on July 1, 2020 [2 favorites]

I'm not sure which I'm more impressed with...The branched flow or that freaking perfect bubble.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:01 PM on July 1, 2020

this is really cool! fascinating that branched flow has been observed in tsunamis.
posted by supermedusa at 12:34 PM on July 1, 2020

The implications for this are potentially wild. "Imagine that you can control the flow of a fluid by controlling the light passed through it." Damn.
posted by kaelynski at 1:34 PM on July 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

That 'distance to first branch' is uncanny. By the time light leaves a lense, it's already 'bent'. I wonder at what point in time/space the branching is deterministic (if that's the right word).
posted by j_curiouser at 5:20 PM on July 1, 2020

I wonder if this is related to the "filaments" phenomenon when you shine a pulsed terawatt laser through the atmosphere, wherein the intense light self-lenses by affecting the air around it.
posted by Belostomatidae at 7:09 PM on July 1, 2020 [2 favorites]

I’m so glad they said it was tricky to focus the laser on the surface of the bubble to get the effect, because the entire first part of that video, I was like, “You mean I could’a shot a laser pointer at dish soap and made a major scientific discovery‽”
posted by LEGO Damashii at 10:20 PM on July 1, 2020 [3 favorites]

You guys shoot pulsed terawatt lasers through the atmosphere, wherein?
posted by away for regrooving at 2:09 AM on July 2, 2020

Is this one of those things where I could email someone requesting a copy of the paper? I'm really interested in what their physical setup was.
posted by Mitheral at 11:55 AM on July 2, 2020

Mitheral, you can contact two of the paper's authors via https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2376-8/email/correspondent/c2/new and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2376-8/email/correspondent/c1/new . You can also encourage them to self-archive so that others may also have access without needing to email them (perhaps by using the fabulous, free, and legal unpaywall browser extension)
posted by khedron at 7:37 AM on July 3, 2020