Waves and particles are distinct objects at a macroscopic scale. The existence of walkers, drops bouncing on a vertically vibrated fluid bath is a surprising case of dual objects at our scale. The drop is self-propelled, piloted by the standing surface waves generated by its previous rebounds. These objects exhibit a rich dynamics relying on the concept of path memory. Indeed, the wave field results from the position of the past impacts left all along the walker trajectory. The memory is tunable at will by simply changing the vertical acceleration of the bath. A series of experiments have revealed the surprising dynamical behaviors of this dual drop-wave entity. In this talk, I will give a theoretical understanding of the temporal non local structure of walkers. We explore the dynamics of numerical walkers in a two-dimensional harmonic potential. We observe that the system only reaches a relatively limited set of stable attractors, quantized in both extension and mean angular momentum, in excellent agreement with the experimental results. We analyze the non-local mechanism revealing the internal symmetries of the walker which drives the convergence of the dynamics to a set of low-dimensional eigenstates. This work has also unexpectedly inspired a novel wave control strategy. At the end of the talk I will explain how we can leverage spatio-temporal properties of a fluid interface to manipulate and play with surface waves.
Leiden University and AMOLF