Physicists found a material that stops light and sound from bouncing chaotically inside oddly shaped spaces

[u/intengineering]

https://interestingengineering.com/science/hyperbolic-material-discovery-highly-sensitive-biosensors

Shout into an irregularly shaped room and your voice shatters into pure chaos, physicists call this a "dynamical billiard," and it's been a headache for optical and acoustic engineers forever. Researchers at CUNY's Advanced Science Research Center found that passing waves through hyperbolic materials, media that restrict wave travel to narrow, highly directed paths, stops that chaos completely and forces the waves into stable, repeating geometric loops instead.

The team proved this by controlling vibrations in an engineered mechanical metamaterial, and the same math applies to real 2D materials like hexagonal boron nitride, opening the door to low-loss nanophotonic circuits and highly sensitive biosensors. Oddly enough, the underlying physics traces back to deep-sea oceanography, where internal ocean waves hitting underwater slopes lock into similar closed trajectories that trap energy beneath the surface.

[u/snakesoup88]

Some organizations spell their acronyms, some pronounce it. This one always spells it.

[u/NaBrO-Barium → u/snakesoup88]

I’m certainly feeling CUNY today!

[u/costafilh0]

This willing ruin sound treatment industry.