2003/08/01 by Daniel I. Goldman, J. B. Swift, Harry L. Swinney
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Fluid Dynamics and Turbulent Flows #Granular flow and fluidized beds #Material Dynamics and Properties #cond-mat
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.92.174302
published as Physical Review Letters 92, 174302 (2004) · 4 pages, 4 figures, submitted to PRL
arxiv created 2003/08/01 · openalex publication_date 2004/04/29 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study fluctuations in a vertically oscillated layer of grains below the critical acceleration for the onset of ordered standing waves. As onset is approached, transient disordered waves with a characteristic length scale emerge and increase in power and coherence. The scaling behavior and the shift in the onset of order agrees with the Swift-Hohenberg theory for convection in fluids. However, the noise in the granular system is an order of magnitude larger than the thermal noise in the most sensitive convecting fluid experiments to date; the effect of the granular noise is observable 20% below the onset of order.