Photoacoustic effect a rotating slotted wheel. He noticed that the resulting acoustic signal was dependent on the type of the material and correctly reasoned that the effect was caused by the absorbed light energy, which subsequently heats the sample. Later Bell showed that materials exposed to the non-visible (ultra-violet and infra-red) portions of the solar spectrum can also produce sounds and invented a device, which he called "spectrophone", to apply this effect for spectral identification of materials. Bell himself and later John Tyndall and Wilhelm Röntgen extended these experiments, demonstrating the same effect in liquids and gases. However, the results were too
Photoacoustic effect added steady light does not produce any photoacoustic effect by itself, but changes the photoacoustic response due to the modulated/pulsed probing light. The resulting signal serves as a reference to all other measurements in absence of the background light. The photothermal part of the reference signal is maximal, since at photosynthetic saturation no energy is stored. At the same time the contribution of the other mechanisms tends to zero at saturation. Thus the reference signal is proportional to the total absorbed light energy. In order to separate and define the photobaric and photothermal contributions in spongy samples (leaves, lichens) one