English

The depletion force in a bi-disperse granular layer

Soft Condensed Matter 2007-05-23 v1

Abstract

We demonstrate the effect of the depletion force in experiments and simulations of vertically vibrated mixtures of large and small steel spheres. The system exhibits size segregation and a large increase in the pair correlation function of the large spheres for short distances that can be accurately described using a combination of the depletion potential derived for equilibrium colloidal systems and a Boltzmann factor. The Boltzmann factor defines an effective temperature for the system, which we compare to other measures of the temperature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0507623,
  title  = {The depletion force in a bi-disperse granular layer},
  author = {P. Melby and A. Prevost and D. A. Egolf and J. S. Urbach},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0507623},
  year   = {2007}
}