The pilot-wave dynamics of walking droplets in confinement

Abstract

A decade ago, Yves Couder and coworkers discovered that millimetric droplets can walk on a vibrated fluid bath, and that these walking droplets or "walkers" display several features reminiscent of quantum particles. We first describe our experimental advances, that have allowed for a quantitative characterization of the system behavior, and guided the development of our accompanying theoretical models. We then detail our explorations of this rich dynamical system in several settings where the walker is confined, either by boundaries or an external force. Three particular cases are examined: a walker in a corral geometry, a walker in a rotating frame, and a walker passing through an aperture in a submerged barrier. In each setting, as the vibrational forcing is increased, progressively more complex trajectories arise. The manner in which multimodal statistics may emerge from the walker's chaotic dynamics is elucidated.