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Scientists Uncover Stable Wave Patterns in Chaotic Quantum Behavior
Confirmed
In Short: Scientists have uncovered stable wave patterns in chaotic quantum behavior, a finding that could deepen understanding of hidden quantum phenomena.
Scientists have uncovered stable wave patterns in chaotic quantum behavior, a finding that could deepen understanding of hidden quantum phenomena. Their work, published in Communications Physics, shows that water waves traveling toward a swirling vortex from opposite directions create dramatic rotating patterns.
In the quantum version of this effect, electrons move around a tightly wound wire called a solenoid. The study simulates quantum effects using swirling water waves, revealing rotating nodal patterns.
The research team used swirling water waves to simulate a quantum effect, uncovering rotating nodal patterns that could provide new insights into hidden quantum phenomena.
In the strange world of quantum physics, particles can be influenced by forces they never directly pass through. Although scientists predicted this effect in 1959, proving it experimentally took more than 20 years due to the difficulty in measuring changes in the electrons’ wave behavior.
As waves travel past the vortex, they distort and form pitchfork-like patterns that are localized around the central vortex. When the direction of the waves is changed, the distortion pattern is mirrored.
The top two sections of the study show simulated patterns, while the bottom two sections show the patterns seen in the experiments.
"That’s what makes this fluid analogue system so valuable. It reveals topological effects—wave behaviors that occur across the whole system—that can’t be seen in quantum experiments," said a researcher.
"The question for us was, what happens if you send waves from both directions at the same time? We thought that the patterns might cancel each other out, or both pitchfork-like patterns would be visible, but our intuition was completely wrong," said another researcher.
"That setup would mirror conditions in some superconducting materials, with the water waves behaving like a supercurrent. We don’t yet know what we’ll see—and that’s exactly what makes it worth doing," said a third researcher.
What's confirmed
- Researchers have discovered a novel way of making light, sound, and other kinds of waves self-organize into stable patterns under conditions where they would ordinarily behave chaotically.
- Calling these structures “hyperbolic wave attractors,” the research team says that under ordinary conditions, waves reflecting within an irregularly-shaped enclosure will create very complicated patterns, similar to a billiard ball’s movements as it bounced against the edges of an oddly-shaped table.
- When the CUNY team combined these properties with an irregular cavity, they observed something entirely unexpected: rather than becoming increasingly chaotic, the waves progressively self-organized, entering into closed, surprisingly stable pathways.
- “Normally, we expect a complicated cavity to produce complicated, chaotic wave patterns,” said Simon Yves, a postdoctoral researcher at CUNY ASRC and a first author of the study.
- Beyond just unveiling the unusual fundamental physics properties they observed, the team believes their findings could help to provide engineers with all-new methods of precisely controlling waves.
- The team’s study, “ Hyperbolic wave attractors,” was published in Nature Physics on September 28, 2026.
- The research, led by a team at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC), reveals that waves moving within irregularly shaped cavities made from what scientists call hyperbolic materials can be confined to stable, repetitive paths.
- Similarly, even very minor differences in the path that a wave follows can lead to unpredictable behavior.
- However, that isn’t the case with hyperbolic materials, whose unusual physical properties effectively restrict the way these waves move, causing them to travel along highly defined directions.
- As those waves strike surfaces, the resulting effect is that they reflect in directions that would not occur in conventional materials.
- “Here, the opposite happens.” Additionally, the CUNY team demonstrated the phenomenon using vibrations traveling through an engineered mechanical metamaterial, revealing that the resulting wave attractors appear to possess what the team characterizes as “handedness,” where the waves follow either clockwise or counterclockwise trajectories.
- “These results show that wave-attractor physics extends across natural and artificial hyperbolic media and reveal how simultaneous symmetry breaking in the material and cavity geometry produces robust, chiral wave organization in a fully linear system,” the researchers report in their study.
What's still developing
- That's unusual enough – but the researchers spotted the behavior twice, four days and some 225 kilometers (140 miles) apart, suggesting this wasn't simply a chance encounter, but that the amphipods may be deliberately seeking out the sea spiders.
- Thousands of meters below the Southeast Pacific Ocean, scientists have documented just such a partnership.
- “Weather is chaotic, and so small differences really start to perturb massively…Machine learning targets the problem we are really solving, which is approximate noisy physics from incomplete information and finite compute, and so it learns patterns from a lot of data,” said Ferran Alet, a staff research scientist manager at DeepMind.
- “The idea, with a lot of AI applications, is to try to run tasks as end-to-end as possible,” Daniel Rothenberg, an atmospheric scientist at Brightband, said.
- Scientists at Google DeepMind and Google Research released a new artificial intelligence model for weather forecasting today that sees our changing atmosphere more clearly and predicts its behavior more often.
- “This was something new and unexpected,” says Aditya Singh, a PhD student in the Nonlinear and Non-equilibrium Physics Unit and co-first author of the study.