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Caltech Scientists Announce Discovery of a New Type of Waves That Act Like Particles

Published on Tuesday, September 6, 2016 | 1:44 pm
 

Scientists at Pasadena’s California Institute of Technology recently announced they have discovered a new type of optical soliton wave that travels via hitching a ride on and feeding off of the energy of other waves.

Solitons, which are localized waves that act like particles as they travel across space, hold their shape and form rather than dispersing as other waves do. According to a statement released to the media by Caltech, this is the first time a soliton has been observed behaving in a near-parasitic manner.

“This new soliton rides along with another soliton — essentially, in the other soliton’s wake. It also syphons energy off of the other soliton so that it is self-sustaining. It can eventually grow larger than its host,” said Kerry Vahala in the press release, a leading scientist at Caltech who authored the paper about this new type of soliton

To put it in less scientific terms, Vahala used an analogy to liken the newly-discovered soliton to pilot fish, a carnivorous tropical species that swims next to sharks so they can pick up scraps from the their meals. By swimming the shark’s wake, they also reduce water drag and are able to travel more freely.

First discovered in 1834 by when Scottish engineer John Scott Russell noted unusual waves formed in the waters of Union Canal after a barge made a sudden stop, solitons were dubbed “waves of translation” as they retained their shape as they traveled. By the end of the century, solitons were explained mathematically, paving the way for them to be discovered as light waves as well.

Some members of Vahala’s team, which published their paper in the Journal of Natural Physics, first thought the new wave discovery was due to malfunctioning laboratory equipment, but quickly found out otherwise.

“We confirmed that the signal was not an artifact of the instrumentation by observing the signal on two spectrometers. We then knew it was real and had to figure out why a new soliton would spontaneously appear like this,” said Qi-Fan Yang, a member of the research team in the press statement.

According to the press release, the team used a laser input to provide solitons with energy which could not be directly absorbed by the “pilot fish” soliton. As the “shark” soliton consumed the energy, they noticed the energy was being pulled away by the “pilot fish” soliton, which grew in size while the other shrank.

“Once we understood the environment required to sustain the new soliton, it actually became possible to design the microcavities to guarantee their formation and even their properties like wavelength—effectively, color,” said Xu Yi, another research team member in the media statement.

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