TThe ocean seems endless when you stand on its edge, stretching in shades of blue to the horizon. But scientists have managed to create a model of this huge reservoir, so tiny that it can fit on a grain of rice. They miniaturized the sea to make it easier for them to study the nonlinear behavior of water waves, e.g. rogue wavestsunamis and single waves known as solitons.
All of these waves can be simulated to a certain extent in large wave pools with artificial channels several hundred feet long. But the new device, essentially the world's tiniest wave tank, could cut the time required to conduct wave dynamics experiments by a million times – and the days required to collect data in traditional wave tanks to milliseconds, according to Professor Warwick Bowen, who heads the quantum optics laboratory at the University of Queensland in Australia.
When they set their tiny wave reservoir in motion, Bowen and his team observed some pretty exotic things: phenomena that had been predicted by physics but had never been observed before, such as waves that bend backward rather than forward, and solitons that travel in troughs rather than peaks. Physicists used laser light to force an exotic liquid through a tiny tube, creating the waves they wanted to study. They also used laser light to observe the resulting waves. They published data generated by a tiny wave chip in Science.
“Much of the physics underlying waves and turbulence remains a mystery,” said Christopher Baker, the paper's lead author and a physicist at the University of Queensland in Australia, in the paper. statement. But the laws of nonlinear wave motion and turbulence govern “everything from ocean waves and hurricane vortices to the flow of blood and air through our bodies,” he said, as well as the planet's weather, climate and even the functioning of some clean energy technologies such as wind farms.
The device Baker and his team used was built with a layer of superfluid helium just a few millionths of a millimeter thick, and the chip holding it was smaller than a grain of rice. (Superfluid helium is liquid helium that flows with zero viscosity and has unique quantum behavior: for example, it can climb walls.)
In the future, the researchers say they hope to use the tiny wave pool to discover new laws of hydrodynamics, improve the design of wind turbines and ship hulls, better predict weather and study “energy cascades” where large eddies transfer energy to smaller ones.
If they succeed, tiny wave pools could be the wave of the future.
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Main image: (Fast freighter battling the waves), engraving by Hokusai, ca. 1805. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
