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.
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.
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.
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.
The Odd World of Hyperbolic Wave Attractors
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. “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.
Unexpected Discoveries and New Possibilities
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.
“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.
Similar principles could potentially also be applied to light, they say, as well as other electromagnetic waves, and at much smaller scales. This could mean that there are novel applications for use with compact optical chips, analog wave computers, particle-trapping technologies, infrared devices, and even highly sensitive biological sensors and related technologies.
Andrea Alù, the recent study’s principal investigator, says the team’s research “opens a path toward engineering stable and robust wave patterns in systems where waves would normally be expected to rapidly become chaotic.”
The team’s study, “Hyperbolic wave attractors,” was published in Nature Physics on September 28, 2026.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.