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At the heart of every resonator—be it a cello, a gravitational wave detector, or the antenna in your cell phone—there is a beautiful bit of mathematics that has been heretofore unacknowledged.
Yale physicists Jack Harris and Nicholas Read know this because they started finding knots in their data.
In a new study in the journal Nature, Harris, Read, and their co-authors describe a previously unknown characteristic of resonators. A resonator is any object that vibrates only at a specific set of frequencies. They are ubiquitous in sensors, electronics, musical instruments, and other devices, where they are used to produce, amplify, or detect vibrations at specific frequencies.