1 research outputs found
Anderson localization of walking droplets
Understanding the ability of particles to maneuver through disordered
environments is a central problem in innumerable settings, from active matter
and biology to electronics. Macroscopic particles ultimately exhibit diffusive
motion when their energy exceeds the characteristic potential barrier of the
random landscape. In stark contrast, wave-particle duality causes subatomic
particles in disordered media to come to rest even when the potential is weak
-- a remarkable phenomenon known as Anderson localization. Here, we present a
hydrodynamic active system with wave-particle features, a millimetric droplet
self-guided by its own wave field over a submerged random topography, whose
dynamics exhibits localized statistics analogous to those of quantum systems.
Consideration of an ensemble of particle trajectories reveals a suppression of
diffusion when the guiding wave field extends over the disordered topography.
We rationalize mechanistically the emergent statistics by virtue of the
wave-mediated resonant coupling between the droplet and topography, which
produces an attractive wave potential about the localization region. This
hydrodynamic analog, which demonstrates how a classical particle may localize
like a wave, suggests new directions for future research in various areas,
including wave localization, many-body localization, and topological matter.Comment: Title changed, slight format change in figures, and text rewording,
no changes to argument or result