The team, led by research engineer Horst Punzmann, published their findings in the Nature Physics journal yesterday, detailing the discovery of what has been nicknamed a "water surface tractor beam".
The tractor beam effect has demonstrated in laboratory conditions that an object can be made to move towards turbulence on the surface of a fluid, rather than away.
"Small waves produced on the water surface by a vertically oscillating wave maker push floating particles in the direction of the wave propagation," fellow researcher Michael Shats said.
"But as soon as some wave amplitude threshold is reached, waves change their shape and floating particles reverse their direction. A ping-pong ball can be pulled towards the wave maker."
The team has not yet tested the discovery outside of the lab, however, Punzmann is confident that it can be adapted to other environments.
"We do this in the lab and our waves have a wave length between a couple of millimetres and one or two centimetres because we're limited by size," Punzmann said.
"To really demonstrate this in an ocean or open wave tank context, we'd need to go to much bigger wave length, so drop the frequency.
"It's a very resilient effect, we're quite confident we can reproduce this with long gravity wave lengths.
"If you know how to shape the wave, you can engineer the flow you want."
Punzmann also noted that the method for generating the reversed effect is quite energy efficient.
"In our case, these wave driven flow phenomena that we observe are confined to a relatively shallow layer on the surface, so it's a surface phenomena effect, which is in the order of the wave length.
"That means it's energetically quite beneficial, so you don't rotate or move a large body of fluid, you only do this on the surface, so that's why the association to floating objects or films is a close one."
While the research is while off being adapted to commercial uses, Punzmann remains optimistic that science can find applications.
"If you know it works, if you know it's possible, you can go for it," he said.
"Whether you use it to clean up oil spills or to collect the leaves in your pool, it's up to your imagination."
