Saturday 11 July 2020

newtonian mechanics - Couder's walking droplets - what are issues of using its intuitions to interpret quantum analogoues?



There are these popular experiments with droplets having wave-particle duality, e.g. here is Veritasium video with 2.3M views, great webpage with materials and videos, a lecture by Couder.


Among others, they claim to recreate:





  1. Interference in particle statistics of double-slit experiment (PRL 2006) - corpuscle travels one path, but its "pilot wave" travels all paths - affecting trajectory of corpuscle (measured by detectors).




  2. Unpredictable tunneling (PRL 2009) due to complicated state of the field ("memory"), depending on the history - they observe exponential drop of probability to cross a barrier with its width.




  3. Landau orbit quantization (PNAS 2010) - using rotation and Coriolis force as analog of magnetic field and Lorentz force (Michael Berry 1980). The intuition is that the clock has to find a resonance with the field to make it a standing wave (e.g. described by Schrödinger's equation).




  4. Zeeman-like level splitting (PRL 2012) - quantized orbits split proportionally to applied rotation speed (with sign).





  5. Double quantization in harmonic potential (Nature 2014) - of separately both radius (instead of standard: energy) and angular momentum. E.g. n=2 state switches between m=2 oval and m=0 lemniscate of 0 angular momentum.




  6. Recreating eigenstate form statistics of a walker's trajectories (PRE 2013).




They connect these experiments with de Broglie-Bohm interpretation, e.g. supported by measurement of average trajectories in double-slit experiment (Science 2011).


While in Couder's experiments oscillations are due to external periodic force, for quantum physics they would need e.g. intrinsic oscillations of particles - called de Broglie's clock or Zitterbewegung - separate stack.



I wanted to ask about the issues of using its intuitions to understand quantum mechanical analogous?




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