Can electromagnetic Waves like light, X-Ray, infrared and so on, interact with each other, like Soundwaves can?

Submitted by Hairy-Ad-3620 t3_y1kwlm in askscience

Might be a bit silly or dumb question, but I always wondered about this. So I know that soundwaves from different sources can influence each others in various ways and I was wondering if that goes electromagnetic waves too, as both are "waves"... Moreover, it would also interest me in how much the overall behaviour of both can be compared at all? Are both perfect congruent eqivalents that can be used to make assumptions of the behaviour of each others, or do the have only some few vague shared traits in terms of that and are fundamentally different aside from that? Or is it more something inbetween?

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Lashb1ade t1_irzjfr4 wrote

Light can indeed perform constructive and destructive interference, if that is what you are asking. This is the basis for the famous double -slit experiment, which was an early proof of the wave-nature of light.

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mfb- t1_is09y83 wrote

To a very good approximation there is no direct interaction in any of these cases, that includes sound. You just get the sum of different sources everywhere.

To get anything else you need nonlinear effects, which are pretty exotic. For sound you can get that if it's very loud. For electromagnetic radiation you can get that in some special materials, or if you have very high intensities.

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RippSir t1_is2uxrb wrote

Depends on what you mean by interaction. Sound is a difference in pressure, these pressures can add up. Light is electromagnec waves which can also add up. Its like two humans pushing an object, the object will feel double the force, but the humans are not necessarily interacting. Light can interact with each other under the presence of atoms if the light is strong enough. For instance two photons can combine into one with doubled frequency: e.g. green laser pointer.

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[deleted] t1_irzqtuv wrote

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Simcoe6 t1_irzr09k wrote

I forgot to give a deeper explanation of why the acoustic waves can interfere in all the cases. This is because of all them lives in the same space (following the terminology that I used before), i.e. the medium.

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