A mechanism of macroscopic rigid-body behavior through evanescent mode
arXiv:1807.04600 · doi:10.1140/epjb/s10051-021-00117-8
Abstract
It has been numerically found that the setup of Newton's cradle can exhibit a rigid-body like behavior, that is, the target cluster starts to move collectively without emitting the outermost particle if the purely repulsive interaction between the neighbouring particles is very "soft" [KS, Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 124302 (2010)]. We show theoretically that such an interaction leads to an evanescent mode within the cluster, which delivers the momentum within the cluster without any propagating oscillation.
7 pages with 4 figures, with SI movie. Accepted by EPJB in May 2021