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

Eli Livne·Baruch Meerson·Pavel V. Sasorov
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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.

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Eli Livne, Baruch Meerson, Pavel V. Sasorov. 2002-04-12. Symmetry breaking and coarsening of clusters in a prototypical driven granular gas. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.66.050301

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