Sudden Collapse of a Granular Cluster

2002/04/12 by Devaraj van der Meer, Ko van der Weele, Detlef Lohse · 5 citations
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Granular flow and fluidized beds #Material Dynamics and Properties #Particle Dynamics in Fluid Flows #cond-mat.soft #nlin.CD

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.88.174302

published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 174302 (2002) · 4 pages, 4 figures. Figure quality has been reduced in order to decrease file-size

arxiv created 2002/04/12 · openalex publication_date 2002/04/15 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Single clusters in a vibro-fluidized granular gas in N connected compartments become unstable at strong shaking. They are experimentally shown to collapse very abruptly. The observed cluster lifetime (as a function of the driving intensity) is analytically calculated within a flux model, making use of the self-similarity of the process. After collapse, the cluster diffuses out into the uniform distribution in a self-similar way, with an anomalous diffusion exponent 1/3.

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