Hydrodynamic Analog for Spontanenous Emission Radiation

It has been shown that a drop of fluid can be made to bounce on a vertically oscillating bath of fluid. These droplets, known as “walkers”, couple to the waves they generate and are propelled forward. When a variation of depth in the fluid bath is introduced it creates a difference in potential; droplets crossing the barrier must do so on a transmitted exponentially decaying wave. We have created a system which spontaneously generates walker droplets to simulate particles leaving a potential well. Previous studies of walker droplets have used forcing amplitudes just below the Faraday instability threshold to study the drop’s path about the fluid bath. In this system we use a forcing amplitude well above the threshold in order to generate walker droplets autonomously. The droplets then tunnel across a potential barrier to a damped region where the fluid is below the instability threshold. The formation of these droplets and their resulting kinetic energy is related to the amplitude and frequency of the driving oscillation. We present a statistical study of droplet emmision from a potential well. The system could provide an analog to radioactivity in which particles spontaneously tunnel across a potential barrier, showing promise for future analysis.