Path-memory induced quantization of classical orbits
By Emmanuel Fort, A. Eddi, Arezki Boudaoud, J. Moukhtar, Y. Couder. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010
235 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A droplet bouncing on a liquid bath can self-propel due to its interaction with the waves it generates. The resulting “walker” is a dynamical association where, at a macroscopic scale, a particle (the droplet) is driven by a pilot-wave field. A specificity of this system is that the wave field itself results from the superposition of the waves generated at the points of space recently visited by the particle. It thus contains a memory of the past trajectory of the particle. Here, we investigate the response of this object to forces orthogonal to its motion. We find that the resulting closed orbits present a spontaneous quantization. This is observed only when the memory of the system is long enough for the particle to interact with the wave sources distributed along the whole orbit. An additional force then limits the possible orbits to a discrete set. The wave-sustained path memory is thus demonstrated to generate a quantization of angular momentum. Because a quantum-like uncertainty was also observed recently in these systems, the nonlocality generated by path memory opens new perspectives.
Subfields: Acoustics and Ultrasonics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ec46f544e96c8220392a50caaab53ee37afdd585
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Citations in the corpus
- Information stored in Faraday waves: the origin of a path memory (2011, methodology): “Their observation also requires that the waves contain information on the droplet’s past trajectory, what was called (Fort et al. 2010) the wave-mediated path memory of the system.”
- Drops bouncing on a vibrating bath (2013, background): “…include tunnelling across a subsurface barrier (Eddi et al. 2009b), single-particle diffraction in both single- and double-slit geometries (Couder & Fort 2006), quantized orbits analogous to Landau levels in quantum mechanics (Fort et al. 2010) and orbital level splitting (Eddi et al. 2012).”