The smallest wave tank in the world

TThe ocean seems endless when you stand at its edge, stretching in shades of blue to the horizon. But scientists have managed to create a model of this vast body of water so small that it can fit on a grain of rice. They miniaturized the sea so they could more easily study the nonlinear behavior of waves, such as rogue waves, tsunamis, and solitary waves called solitons.

All of these waves can be modeled to some extent in large wave pools, with artificial channels spanning several hundred feet. But the new device, essentially the world’s smallest wave tank, could cut the time it takes to conduct wave dynamics experiments by a million and the number of days it takes to collect data in traditional wave tanks to a matter of milliseconds, according to Professor Warwick Bowen, who directs the Quantum Optics Laboratory at the University of Queensland in Australia.

When they set their little wave tank in motion, Bowen and his team observed some pretty exotic things: phenomena that had been predicted by physics but had never been observed before, like waves that leaned backwards instead of forwards and solitons that moved in depressions rather than peaks. Physicists used laser light to pass an exotic fluid through a tiny tube, creating the waves they wanted to study. They also used laser light to observe emerging waves. They published the data generated with the small wave chip in Science.

“Much of the physics behind waves and turbulence remains a mystery,” Christopher Baker, lead author of the paper and a physicist at the University of Queensland in Australia, said in a statement. But the laws of nonlinear wave motion and turbulence govern “everything from ocean waves and hurricane swirl to the flow of blood and air in our bodies,” he said, as well as the planet’s weather, climate and even the operation of some clean energy technologies like wind farms.

The device used by Baker and his team was built with a layer of superfluid helium just a few millionths of a millimeter thick, and the chip that contains it is smaller than a grain of rice. (Superfluid helium is liquid helium that flows with zero viscosity and has unique quantum behaviors: for example, it can climb walls.)

In the future, researchers hope to use the small wave pool to discover new laws of fluid dynamics, improve the design of wind turbines and ship hulls, better predict the weather, and explore “energy cascades,” where large eddies transfer energy to smaller ones.

If they succeed, small wave pools could be the wave of the future.

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Main image: (Fast Cargo Boat Battling The Waves), print by Hokusai, c. 1805. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

• Kristen French

  Published on October 24, 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and editing features and news for publications such as Wired, Rear channel, The edgeAnd new York magazine, among others. She studied science journalism at Columbia University. She is based in San Diego.