比利时列日大学量子力学博士后职位

A two-year postdoc position from 1st September 2014 is available at University of Liège, Belgium. This position is open in the framework of an ongoing 5-year project (involving Profs. P. Schlagheck, T. Gilet, J. Martin, N. Vandewalle and T. Bastin) which aims at studying the dynamics of droplets that are periodically bouncing on the surface of vibrated liquids.

Such droplets are observed to “walk”, i.e., to undergo horizontal motion on the liquid surface, owing to their interaction with the surface waves that they generate when bouncing of the liquid. Within confined geometries, the complex scattering of surface waves forces the motion of each individual droplet to be chaotic. Nevertheless, it is surprisingly observed that a statistical average over the droplet positions yields the same probability distribution as the one that would be expected for a quantum particle described by a wavefunction. In particular, the characteristic double-slit interference pattern was experimentally observed with individual droplets that propagated through a two-slit scattering geometry. This result is the starting point of a possible analogy between the motion of a droplet interacting with its surface wave and the dynamics of a quantum particle that is, in the Bohmian interpretation of quantum mechanics, piloted by its associated wavefunction.

The current advertised post-doc position is meant for a theoretician with a good knowledge of quantum mechanics who is to be in charge of exploring the wave-particle duality in droplet systems and their analogies with quantum mechanics.