https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/s10189-023-00288-5
Regular Article - Flowing Matter
Statistical self-organization of an assembly of interacting walking drops in a confining potential
1
Gulliver, UMR CNRS 7083, ESPCI Paris, Université PSL, 75005, Paris, France
2
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Western University, 1151 Richmond St, N6A 3K7, London, Canada
Received:
26
September
2022
Accepted:
31
March
2023
Published online:
14
April
2023
A drop bouncing on a vertically vibrated surface may self-propel forward by standing waves and travels along a fluid interface. This system called walking drop forms a non-quantum wave-particle association at the macroscopic scale. The dynamics of one particle has triggered many investigations and has resulted in spectacular experimental results in the last decade. We investigate numerically the dynamics of an assembly of walkers, i.e., a large number of walking drops evolving on a unbounded fluid interface in the presence of a confining potential acting on the particles. We show that even if the individual trajectories are erratic, the system presents a well-defined ordered internal structure that remains invariant to parameter variations such as the number of drops, the memory time and the bath radius. We rationalize such non-stationary self-organization in terms of the symmetry of the waves and show that oscillatory pair potentials form a wavy collective state of active matter.
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