The Faraday Wave Blues

Courtesy DSWeb (SIAM's online dynamical systems magazine), here is a bluesy YouTube video about holes in Faraday patterns. The narrator has trouble keeping a straight face at the end of the video, but in general this is extremely amusing for quite a while. As discussed in this article, this video (and other ones with different narratives and background sounds) started life as a non-winning entry in the Gallery of Fluid Motion. Maybe my nonlinear science gallery video will ultimately have a similar fate?

Faraday patterns observed in BEC experiments

This summer, one of my SURF students (Tatjana Wiese) studied Faraday patterns in Bose-Einstein condensates. These patterns had not yet been observed in BECs and while the project was a cute theoretical project, I wasn't sure how easy that stuff would actually be to observe experimentally in a BEC setting. Well, a paper just posted on the arxiv reports the first experimental observations of Faraday patterns in BECs. Now, while this is not as cool as when predictions that I published (that people didn't seem to think would be seen in experiments) were observed experimentally a year later, it's still nice to know that I can pick out phenomena for my students to work that haven't yet been seen in experiments but subsequently are. (It's also not as cool as when I predict something, convince somebody to try something in the laboratory, and it subsequently works perfectly. Of course, that has only happened a couple times. This has lead to two papers in PRL and an archival paper currently under review by an applied math journal.)

I originally got this idea while I was attending a pattern formation conference in Cambridge in December 2005. Faraday patterns were the theme of one of the days, and I had this sudden insight that Faraday patterns would be a cool thing to study theoretically in BECs. I e-mailed one of my collaborators to tell him about this, and he e-mailed me back a reference from 2002 in which that had been done. (At least my I knew my idea worked...) My student studied an extension of their results.