Branched flow, the new phenomenon of light.

Branched flow is such a recent concept that it does not even have its Wikipedia page in Spanish, in fact, it only exists in English, in Spanish I could only find a report from the Rey Juan Carlos University of Spain about an article published by some Harvard physicists, so, if you do research and are looking for what to do, this is a little explored topic.

It all started in 2001 when some researchers were carrying out a small experiment. They wanted to see how electrons were transported through a very, very flat material, just a few atoms thick, which is practically two-dimensional. With an equally fine tip they led the electrons to the plate to study how they moved through it. The theory told them that they should propagate like waves, but the experiment showed something very strange.

The electrons took very defined paths, as if they were rivers, rivers of electrons, from there we began to investigate the phenomenon and we realized that it happens at all scales and this helped explain very complex phenomena.

When a strong earthquake occurs on the coast, tsunami alerts are activated in places as remote as the other side of the largest ocean on the planet, the Pacific. The tsunami probes should lose energy as they move across such a large ocean, but in practice this is not the case. The energy is concentrated in branches that can reach the coasts very far from the epicenter. Chile, the tsunami arrives strong, despite being thousands of kilometers further from the epicenter and destroys 80 houses in the coastal town of Puerto Viejo.

What is shown in the video is the branched flow in action, the tsunami waves concentrate in branches when interacting with the variations in the depth of the seabed and reach very distant coasts with great force, causing destruction on one beach and leaving the next one practically intact. It is believed that branching flow may also explain the formation of monster waves, enormous waves that appear suddenly and without warning in the middle of a calm sea.

We are still in the process of understanding this phenomenon, so we are not yet sure if branching flow has any relation to this phenomenon, but branching flow not only exists on the quantum scale of electrons flowing through a microscopic wafer or on the macro scale of tsunamis crossing oceans, we can also see it on the largest scale, the cosmological scale. Intergalactic space also has filaments or branches of energy and concentrated matter, it is not a homogeneous soup, it is more like a spongy bun full of bubbles, which are the spaces where there is less concentration of matter and energy.

And in this experiment there is the perfect situation for an effect of light that we know perfectly well to be seen, refraction, light changes direction when it passes from one material to another that has a different density. The membrane is not perfect and does not produce a uniform refraction like a glass, instead, it has small variations in density that deflect the light in one direction and another, little by little describing curved and irregular paths.

But the most interesting thing is that these paths are not completely chaotic, the light seems to prefer some paths over others and concentrates on large, bright branches and then separates into smaller branches, it is simply surprising.

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