Bouncing droplets in quantized orbits
ORAL
Abstract
A drop of silicon oil on a vibrating bath can surprisingly bounce without coalescing. Slightly below the Faraday threshold, each impact creates a slowly decreasing stationary wave. Driven by the whole past field, a small increment of momentum is given to the droplet at each rebound that leads to a walking regime. This macroscopic wave particle system exhibits fascinating quantum-like behaviour that is strongly experimentally supported by diffraction interference, double slits, Landau levels, tunnel effect, Zeeman effect, cavities. A new step has been taken in the understanding of this system by applying an external potential to a double-structured ferrofluidic drop. Depending of the magnitude of its past field, i.e. the memory of the system, a shift from classical to statistically-quantized behaviours arises. First, we will report the experimental observations of this dual system in the light of the previous experiments. Then, a brief overview of a theoretical approach will be presented to simply rationalize these quantized behaviours.
–