Applications: plasmonic couplers & lenses that could create 2D holograms or focus light at the nanoscale.
Wakes occur whenever something is traveling through a medium faster than the waves it creates – in the duck’s case water waves, in the plane’s case sonic booms.
While nothing travels faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, light isn’t always in a vacuum. It is possible for something to move faster than the phase velocity of light in a medium or material and generate a wake. The most famous example of this is Cherenkov radiation, wakes produced as electrical charges travel through liquids faster than the phase velocity of light, emitting a glowing blue wake. In this case Harvard researchers created similar wakes of light-like waves moving on #metallic surface = surface plasmons
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