Popular walking droplets experimets - proper QM intuitions?

Foundations of physics and/or philosophy of physics, and in particular, posts on unresolved or controversial issues

Popular walking droplets experimets - proper QM intuitions?

Postby Jarek » Sat Aug 25, 2018 12:52 am

There are these popular experiments with droplets having wave-particle duality started by Couder, e.g. here is Veritasium video with 2.5M views, great webpage with materials and videos, a lecture by Couder, my slides with additional hydrodynamical analogues (e.g. of Casimir effect and Aharonov-Bohm).

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, which has been confirmed experimentally.

Can we use intuitions they bring to understand their quantum counterparts?
Jarek
 
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