Symmetry breaking and coarsening of clusters in a prototypical driven granular gas

Abstract

Granular hydrodynamics predicts symmetry-breaking instability in a two-dimensional (2D) ensemble of nearly elastically colliding smooth hard spheres driven, at zero gravity, by a rapidly vibrating sidewall. Super- and subcritical symmetry-breaking bifurcations of the simple clustered state are identified, and the supercritical bifurcation curve is computed. The cluster dynamics proceed as a coarsening process mediated by the gas phase. Far above the bifurcation point the final steady state, selected by coarsening, represents a single strongly localized densely packed 2D cluster.

5 pages, 4 eps figures

References in corpus (3)

• Global Equation of State of two-dimensional hard sphere systems
• Transversal inhomogeneities in dilute vibrofluidized granular fluids
• Symmetry-breaking instability in a prototypical driven granular gas

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Patterns and Collective Behavior in Granular Media: Theoretical Concepts
• Onset of thermal convection in a horizontal layer of granular gas
• Local Equation of State and Velocity Distributions of a Driven Granular Gas
• Oscillatory instability in a driven granular gas
• Phase diagram of van der Waals-like phase separation in a driven granular gas
• Giant fluctuations at a granular phase separation threshold
• Navier-Stokes hydrodynamics of thermal collapse in a freely cooling granular gas
• Vibrated granular gas confined by a piston
• Phase separation of a driven granular gas in annular geometry
• Volume fluctuations and compressibility of a vibrated granular gas
• Noise induces rare events in granular media
• Close-packed granular clusters: hydrostatics and persistent Gaussian fluctuations