“It’s the first pilot-wave system discovered and gives insight into how rational quantum dynamics might work, were such a thing to exist.” “This hydrodynamic system is subtle, and extraordinarily rich in terms of mathematical modeling,” says John Bush, a professor of applied mathematics at MIT and corresponding author on the new paper. In the new experiments, bouncing drops of fluid mimicked the electrons’ statistical behavior with remarkable accuracy. In the latest issue of the journal Physical Review E (PRE), a team of MIT researchers, in collaboration with Couder and his colleagues, report that they have produced the fluidic analogue of another classic quantum experiment, in which electrons are confined to a circular “corral” by a ring of ions. In 2006, Yves Couder and Emmanuel Fort, physicists at Université Paris Diderot, used this system to reproduce one of the most famous experiments in quantum physics: the so-called “double-slit” experiment, in which particles are fired at a screen through a barrier with two holes in it. Recently, however, a real pilot-wave system has been discovered, in which a drop of fluid bounces across a vibrating fluid bath, propelled by waves produced by its own collisions. Physicists’ inability to detect de Broglie’s posited waves led them, for the most part, to abandon pilot-wave theory. According to de Broglie, moving particles - such as electrons, or the photons in a beam of light - are borne along on waves of some type, like driftwood on a tide. In the early days of quantum physics, in an attempt to explain the wavelike behavior of quantum particles, the French physicist Louis de Broglie proposed what he called a “pilot wave” theory.
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