Direct measurement of superdiffusive and subdiffusive energy transport in disordered granular chains

Abstract

The study of energy transport properties in heterogeneous materials has attracted scientific interest for more than a century, and it continues to offer fundamental and rich questions. One of the unanswered challenges is to extend Anderson theory for uncorrelated and fully disordered lattices in condensed-matter systems to physical settings in which additional effects compete with disorder. Specifically, the effect of strong nonlinearity has been largely unexplored experimentally, partly due to the paucity of testbeds that can combine the effect of disorder and nonlinearity in a controllable manner. Here we present the first systematic experimental study of energy transport and localization properties in simultaneously disordered and nonlinear granular crystals. We demonstrate experimentally that disorder and nonlinearity --- which are known from decades of studies to individually favor energy localization --- can in some sense "cancel each other out", resulting in the destruction of wave localization. We also report that the combined effect of disorder and nonlinearity can enable the manipulation of energy transport speed in granular crystals from subdiffusive to superdiffusive ranges.

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References in corpus (6)

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• Universal spreading of wavepackets in disordered nonlinear systems
• Absence of Wavepacket Diffusion in Disordered Nonlinear Systems
• Nonlinear Coherent Structures in Granular Crystals
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• Wave propagation across interfaces induced by different interaction exponents in ordered and disordered Hertz-like granular chains
• Wave propagation in a strongly disordered 1D phononic lattice supporting rotational waves
• Nanoptera in nonlinear woodpile chains with zero precompression
• Quantum information spreading in a disordered quantum walk
• Elastic Wannier-Stark Ladders and Bloch Oscillations in 1D Granular Crystals
• Nanoptera in weakly nonlinear woodpile and diatomic granular chains
• Energy spreading, equipartition and chaos in lattices with non-central forces