In 1990, a paper by Crum and Gaitan was presented at the 12th International Symposium on Nonlinear Acoustics, held in Austin, Texas. This paper reported on the discovery of light emissions from a single, stable, bubble, acoustically levitated in a glass flask. This phenomenon was later known as Single Bubble Sonoluminescence (SBSL). Subsequently, this discovery became of international interest, with hundreds of papers published attempting to explain this remarkable behavior. Papers suggested that this was a demonstration of the Dynamic Casimir Effect, that it mimicked the collapse of black holes, and one paper even reported evidence for nuclear fusion. Eventually, the behavior was explained by noting that the bubble acted as miniature chemical reactor, converting the air enclosed in the bubble to a soluble nitrogen molecular complex. Recently, the author was presented with the copy of an abstract, suggesting that this phenomenon was observed nearly 30 years earlier by Katsuya Yosioka and Akira Omura at the Institute of Scientific Research, Osaka University, Japan. The author wishes to acknowledge this paper, to discuss it contents, and to suggest that what Yosioka ad Omura observed was not true SBSL.
Lawrence A. Crum (Tue,) studied this question.