English

Spontaneous Ratchet Effect in a Granular Gas

Soft Condensed Matter 2016-08-31 v2 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

The spontaneous clustering of a vibrofluidized granular gas is employed to generate directed transport in two different compartmentalized systems: a "granular fountain" in which the transport takes the form of convection rolls, and a "granular ratchet" with a spontaneous particle current perpendicular to the direction of energy input. In both instances, transport is not due to any system-intrinsic anisotropy, but arises as a spontaneous collective symmetry breaking effect of many interacting granular particles. The experimental and numerical results are quantitatively accounted for within a flux model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0306640,
  title  = {Spontaneous Ratchet Effect in a Granular Gas},
  author = {Devaraj van der Meer and Peter Reimann and Ko van der Weele and Detlef Lohse},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0306640},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

4 pages, 5 figures; Fig. 4 has been reduced in size and quality

R2 v1 2026-07-22T10:51:49.485Z