Using chaotic Faraday waves to create a two-dimensional pseudo-thermal bath for floating particles with tunable interaction potentials

Whether chaos in actively driven systems can be described by an effective temperature is an unresolved question in the study of nonlinear physics. We use chaotic Faraday waves to create a two-dimensional pseudo-thermal bath to investigate tunable interactions between floating particles. By vertically oscillating a liquid with an acceleration greater than $g$ we excite the Faraday instability and create surface waves. Increasing this acceleration above some critical value causes this instability to become chaotic with fluctuations over a broad range of length scales. Particles placed on the surface are buffeted by random excitations in analogy to Brownian motion. We can change the ``temperature'' of the pseudo-thermal bath by manipulating the driving frequency and amplitude, a feature of the system we verify using real-time tracking to follow the diffusive movement of a single particle. With an eye toward creating complex self-assembling systems we use this system to measure the tunable interaction potential in two-, three-, and many-particle systems and to probe the effects of particle size, shape, symmetry, and wetting properties.