Group 1

Faraday Waves and Nonlinear Patterns

Background

Eponymously discovered by Faraday[1], Faraday Waves are standing waves on a fluid caused by vertical oscillatory motion. At given frequencies, these standing waves give surface paterns of n dimensional rotational symmetry; mainly square, hexagonal, and 8-fold quasi-static paterns. This experiment is designed to reproduce the results of quantifying the observance of these waves by Binks and W. van de Water [3]. The expected results should also agree with Zhang and Vinals' [2] prediction of the amplitudes of the standing waves. The experiment will go a step further and not only test the theory out for different fluids (including a non-newtonian fluid), but for different oscillatory patterns.

Videos of Faraday Waves

Faraday Waves on Cornflour Faraday Waves set to music

Group Members

• Juan Orphee
• Paul Cardenas-Lizana
• Michael Lane
• Elan Grossman

Sources

[1] M. Faraday, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London 121, 319 (1831)

[2] W. Zhang and J. Viñals, Phys. Rev. E 53, R4286 (1996)

[3] D. Binks and W. van de Water, Phy. Rev. Lett. 78, 4043 (1997)

[4] Peilong Chen and J. Vinals, Phys. Rev. Lett, 79, 2670 (1997)