Gilet, T. (2016). Quantumlike statistics of deterministic wave-particle interactions in a circular cavity. Physical Review E, 93(4), 042202.
A deterministic low-dimensional iterated map is proposed here to describe the interaction between a bouncing droplet and Faradaywaves confined to a circular cavity. Its solutions are investigated theoretically and numerically. The horizontal trajectory of the droplet can be chaotic: it then corresponds to a random walk of average step size equal to half the Faraday wavelength. An analogy is made between the diffusion coefficient of this random walk and the action per unit mass /m of a quantum particle. The statistics of droplet position and speed are shaped by the cavity eigenmodes, in remarkable agreement with the solution of Schr¨odinger equation for a quantum particle in a similar potential well.
