A new study by scientists in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) shows that when a pressure disturbance moves across an ultrasoft elastic material, such as a gel or a biological tissue, it generates a V-shaped wake that’s strikingly similar to the waves that travel behind a boat.

Published in Physical Review Letters, the study offers a unified perspective, combining experiments and theory, on surface motion that spans fluids, solids, and the soft materials that lie between. It opens the door to new approaches to imaging and understanding the behavior of both natural and engineered soft materials.

The research was led by L. Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Physics, in SEAS and FAS, and includes first author and former postdoctoral researcher Aditi Chakrabarti; postdoctoral researcher Divya Jaganathan, and SEAS research associate Robert Haussman.