2003/11/13 by Evgeniy Khain, E Khain, Baruch Meerson +1
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Granular flow and fluidized beds #Material Dynamics and Properties #Nonlinear Photonic Systems #cond-mat.soft #nlin.CD
paper · pdf · doi:10.1209/epl/i2003-10072-8
7 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Europhysics Letters
arxiv created 2003/11/13 · openalex publication_date 2004/01/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
We discovered an oscillatory instability in a system of inelastically colliding hard spheres, driven by two opposite "thermal" walls at zero gravity. The instability, predicted by a linear stability analysis of the equations of granular hydrodynamics, occurs when the inelasticity of particle collisions exceeds a critical value. Molecular-dynamics simulations support the theory and show a stripe-shaped cluster moving back and forth in the middle of the box away from the driving walls. The oscillations are irregular but have a single dominating frequency that is close to the frequency at the instability onset, predicted from hydrodynamics.