A plastic land mine can be dangerous for a reason beyond its explosive power. It may leave little behind for a metal detector to find. That challenge led University at Buffalo physicist Surajit Sen toward an unusual idea involving shock waves. His research suggested that soil itself could help reveal what lies hidden beneath it.
Sen was studying how mechanical energy moves through beds of grains when the connection emerged. A television report about land mines made him wonder about his earlier work. Could the same unusual waves moving through granular materials reveal buried objects? Computer simulations suggested they might, although the idea still needed testing outside the computer.
