Transition to a labyrinthine phase in a driven granular medium

Abstract

Labyrinthine patterns arise in two-dimensional physical systems submitted to competing interactions, ranging from the fields of solid-state physics to hydrodynamics. For systems of interacting particles, labyrinthine and stripe phases were studied in the context of colloidal particles confined into a monolayer, both numerically by means of Monte Carlo simulations and experimentally using superparamagnetic particles. Here we report an experimental observation of a labyrinthine phase in an out-of-equilibrium system constituted of macroscopic particles. Once sufficiently magnetized, they organize into short chains of particles in contact and randomly orientated. We characterize the transition from a granular gas state towards a solid labyrinthine phase, as a function of the ratio of the interaction strength to the kinetic agitation. Spatial local structure is analyzed by means of an accurate particle tracking. Moreover, we explain the formation of these chains using a simple model.

Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. E; 7 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Geometric Frustration in Buckled Colloidal Monolayers
• Universal velocity distributions in an experimental granular fluid
• Stripes, Zigzags, and Slow Dynamics in Buckled Hard Spheres
• Transition from a dissipative to a quasi-elastic system of particles with tunable repulsive interactions
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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Tuning the distance to the equipartition by controlling the collision rate in a driven granular gas experiment
• Wave spectroscopy in a driven granular material