ASA 128th Meeting - Austin, Texas - 1994 Nov 28 .. Dec 02

4pPAa3. Criticism of experiments on the scattering of sound by sound.

D. H. Trivett

Naval Res. Lab., Underwater Sound Ref. Det., P.O. Box 568337, Orlando, FL 32856-8337

Peter H. Rogers

Georgia Inst. of Technol., Atlanta, GA 30332-0405

At the 127th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Westervelt [Peter J. Westervelt ``Answer to criticism of experiments on the scattering of sound by sound,'' J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 95, 2865 (A)] stated that a recent experiment by Roy and Wu [R. Roy and J. Wu, in Proceedings of the 13th ISNA, edited by H. Hob(ae ligature)k (Elsevier Science, London, 1993)] supported the position that there was no signal scattered out of the interaction region of two perpendicular, collimated sound beams. In this paper, we present an analysis of the Roy and Wu experiment, specifically, and of previous experiments, in general, which have failed to find any scattering of sound by sound. The analysis indicates that the null results of the experiments do not necessarily support theoretical null predictions.