# Couder's walking droplets - what are issues of using its intuitions to interpret quantum analogoues? [duplicate]

There are these popular experiments with droplets having wave-particle duality, e.g. here is Veritasium video with 2.3M views, great webpage with materials and videos, a lecture by Couder.

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 - separate stack.

I wanted to ask about the issues of using its intuitions to understand quantum mechanical analogous?

## marked as duplicate by knzhou, ZeroTheHero, Jon Custer, Buzz, John Rennie newtonian-mechanics StackExchange.ready(function() { if (StackExchange.options.isMobile) return; $('.dupe-hammer-message-hover:not(.hover-bound)').each(function() { var$hover = $(this).addClass('hover-bound'),$msg = $hover.siblings('.dupe-hammer-message');$hover.hover( function() { $hover.showInfoMessage('', { messageElement:$msg.clone().show(), transient: false, position: { my: 'bottom left', at: 'top center', offsetTop: -7 }, dismissable: false, relativeToBody: true }); }, function() { StackExchange.helpers.removeMessages(); } ); }); }); Jan 4 at 7:57

• Be careful, the pilot fields are not necessarily separated in the multiple particle case. In fact, if they were, there would be no entanglement. You can have states like $\psi(\vec{x}_1,\vec{x}_2)=\phi_1(\vec{x}_1)\phi_2(\vec{x}_2)+\phi_2(\vec{x}_1)\phi_1(\vec{x}_2)$ which don't factor in a product of one-particle states. The argument is simply that we can make those states or those states exist in nature. It's as simple as that. – Raskolnikov Feb 16 '18 at 16:03