Related papers: Why Granular Media Are, After All, Thermal
Although fully elastic when static, granular media become transiently elastic when being slowly sheared -- during which both the elastic energy and stress relax. Starting from this observation, we cogently derive the framework for granular…
We remind that the assumptions almost universally adopted among astronomers concerning the physics to use to describe rarefied cosmic gases remain often without justifications, mainly because the long range of gravitation invalidates the…
Non-Arrhenius grain growth has been observed in a range of polycrystalline materials; however, its fundamental mechanisms, particularly whether the process is thermally activated or exhibits anti-thermally activation, remain controversial.…
Polycrystalline materials can be viewed as composites of crystalline particles or grains separated from one another by thin amorphous grain boundary (GB) regions. While GB have been exhaustively investigated at low temperatures, where these…
Granular materials, such as sand or grain, exhibit many structural and dynamic characteristics similar to those observed in molecular systems, despite temperature playing no role in their properties. This has led to an effort to develop a…
The terminology granular matter refers to systems with a large number of hard objects (grains) of mesoscopic size ranging from millimeters to meters. Geological examples include desert sand and the rocks of a landslide. But the scope of…
The properties of interstellar grains can now be defined by a rapidly growing wealth of observational data. We rely upon models to combine these data with unobserved properties such as the size distribution of grains, their structure and…
When compressed frictional granular media are decompressed, generically a fragile configuration is created at low pressures. Typically this is accompanied by a giant frictional slippage as the fragile state collapses. We show that this…
In this letter, we report results on the effect of temperature variations on a granular assembly through Molecular Dynamic simulations of a 2D granular column. Periodic dilation of the grains are shown to perfectly mimic such thermal…
It is now well established, both theoretically and experimentally, that very small changes in the size of isolated nanograins lead to substantial nonmonotonic variations, and sometimes enhancement, of the mean-field spectroscopic gap of…
Granular materials such as sand, powders, and grains are omnipresent in daily life, industrial applications, and earth-science [1]. When unperturbed, they form stable structures that resemble the ones of other amorphous solids like metallic…
Dense granular media have a compaction between the random loose and random close packings. For these dense media the concept of a granular pressure depending on compaction is not unanimously accepted because they are often in a "frozen"…
A diffusion process of a Brownian particle in a medium of temperature $T$ is re-considered. We assume that temperature of the medium fluctuates around its mean value. The velocity probability distribution is obtained. It is shown that the…
In granular systems, thermal cycling causes compaction, creep, penetration of dense objects, and ratcheting of grains against each other. On asteroid surfaces, thermal cycling is high amplitude and can happen billions of times in a few…
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,…
The temperatures of prolate and oblate spheroidal dust grains in the envelopes of stars of various spectral types are calculated. Homogeneous particles with aspect ratios {\small $a/b \le 10$} composed of amorphous carbon, iron, dirty ice,…
The mechanism of thermal inflation, a relatively short period of accelerated expansion after primordial inflation, is a desirable ingredient for a certain class of particle physics models if they are not to be in contention with the…
Since the classical work by Purcell (1979) it has been generally accepted that most interstellar grains rotate suprathermally. Suprathermally rotating grains would be nearly perfectly aligned with the magnetic field by paramagnetic…
Non-cohesive granular media exhibit complex responses to sudden impact that often differ from those of ordinary solids and liquids. We investigate how this response is mediated by the presence of interstitial gas between the grains. Using…
Granular materials are ubiquitous in our daily lives. While they have been a subject of intensive engineering research for centuries, in the last decade granular matter attracted significant attention of physicists. Yet despite a major…