Sander Wildeman
The dissolution process of small (initial (equivalent) radius $R_0 < 1$ mm) long-chain alcohol (of various types) sessile droplets in water is studied, disentangling diffusive and convective contributions. The latter can arise for high…
Wave localization induced by spatial disorder is ubiquitous in physics. Here, we study the temporal analog of such phenomenon on water waves. Our time disordered media consists in a collection of temporal interfaces achieved through…
Submillimeter air-borne drops of well defined size are notoriously difficult to produce in the lab. Here, we demonstrate that any simple droplet dripper, in which millimetric droplets are created by letting them drip under gravity from a…
The humble pendulum is often invoked as the archetype of a simple, gravity driven, oscillator. Under ideal circumstances, the oscillation frequency of the pendulum is independent of its mass and swing amplitude. However, in most real-world…
When light is incident upon a diffraction grating, images of the grating appear at periodic intervals behind the grating. This phenomenon and the associated self-imaging distance were named after Talbot who first observed them in the…
In the Unruh effect an observer with constant acceleration perceives the quantum vacuum as thermal radiation. The Unruh effect has been believed to be a pure quantum phenomenon, but here we show theoretically how the effect arises from the…
A quantitative synthetic Schlieren imaging (SSI) method based on fast Fourier demodulation is presented. Instead of a random dot pattern (as usually employed in SSI), a 2D periodic pattern (such as a checkerboard) is used as a backdrop to…
A drop of water that freezes from the outside-in presents an intriguing problem: the expansion of water upon freezing is incompatible with the self-confinement by a rigid ice shell. Using high-speed imaging we show that this conundrum is…
The energy budget and dissipation mechanisms during droplet impact on solid surfaces are studied numerically and theoretically. We find that for high impact velocities and negligible surface friction at the solid surface (i.e. free-slip),…
We report on the nucleation of bubbles on solids that are gently rubbed against each other in a liquid. The phenomenon is found to depend strongly on the material and roughness of the solid surfaces. For a given surface, temperature, and…