Related papers: A deductive statistical mechanics approach for gra…
At the core of equilibrium statistical mechanics lies the notion of statistical ensembles: a collection of microstates, each occurring with a given a priori probability that depends only on a few macroscopic parameters such as temperature,…
We use an analogy with the statistical mechanics of gas to build the statistical mechanics of granular media. The case of an isotropic disordered packing of equal spheres submitted to an isotropic stress is considered. We use the assumption…
Granular matter is comprised of a large number of particles whose collective behavior determines macroscopic properties such as flow and mechanical strength. A comprehensive theory of the properties of granular matter, therefore, requires a…
By detailed Molecular Dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations %of a realistic model we show that granular materials at rest can be described as thermodynamics systems. First we show that granular packs can be characterized by few parameters,…
We experimentally investigate the steady states of two granular assemblies differing in their material properties and allowed to exchange volume with each other under external agitation in the vicinity of their jamming transition. We…
Granular matter like sand is composed of a large number of interacting grains, and is thus expected to be amenable to a statistical physics treatment. Yet, the frictional properties of grains make the statistical physics of granular matter…
A new first-principles statistical mechanics formulation is proposed to describe slow and dilated granular fluids, where prolonged intergranular contacts vitiate collision theory. The contacts, where all the important physics takes place,…
We present several numerical results on granular mixtures. In particular, we examine the efficiency of diffusion as a mixing mechanism in these systems. The collisions are inelastic and to compensate the energy loss, we thermalize the…
The physical properties of granular materials have been extensively studied in recent years. So far, however, there exists no theoretical framework which can explain the observations in a unified manner beyond the phenomenological jamming…
We present a mathematical theory of dynamical fluctuations for the hard sphere gas in the Boltzmann-Grad limit. We prove that: (1) fluctuations of the empirical measure from the solution of the Boltzmann equation, scaled with the square…
We have discovered an invariant distribution for local packing configurations in static granular media. This distribution holds in experiments for packing fractions covering most of the range from random loose packed to random close packed,…
The dynamics of a one-dimensional stochastic model is studied in presence of an absorbing boundary. The distribution of fluctuations is analytically characterized within the generalized van Kampen expansion, accounting for higher order…
A unifying framework to describe dense flows of dry, deformable grains is proposed. Perturbative analysis of a granular temperature equation describing flows with contact stresses, supported by the recovery of the nonlocal granular fluidity…
We study the behavior of an assembly of $N$ granular particles contained in two compartments within a simple kinetic approach. The particles belonging to each compartment collide inelastically with each other and are driven by a stochastic…
The aim of this review is to provide a concise overview of some of the generic approaches that have been developed to deal with the statistical description of large systems of interacting dissipative 'units'. The latter notion includes,…
A paradigm for isothermal, mechanical rectification of stochastic fluctuations is introduced in this paper. The central idea is to transform energy injected by random perturbations into rigid-body rotational kinetic energy. The prototype…
The general fluctuation theory is reviewed with special attention to the role played by different ensembles, and is extended to incorporate stationary metastable states obtained in the long time limit. The fluctuation in a quantity depends…
We experimentally investigate the response of a sheared granular medium in a Couette geometry. The apparatus exhibits the expected stick-slip motion and we probe it in the very intermittent regime resulting from low driving. Statistical…
We introduce a solvable stochastic model inspired by granular gases for driven dissipative systems. We characterize far from equilibrium steady states of such systems through the non-Boltzmann energy distribution and compare different…
The statistical mechanical basis of the fluctuation theory of mixtures is reviewed. An overview of the statistical mechanical relations between the microscopic properties of a system and its macroscopic properties is presented. The…