Related papers: Preliminary experiments demonstrating a "directed"…
In models of planetary accretion, pebbles form by dust coagulation and rapidly migrate toward the central star. Planetesimals may continuously form from pebbles over the age of the protoplanetary disk by yet uncertain mechanisms. Meanwhile,…
It is shown that mechanical alignment of grains can be efficient for grains rotating suprathermally, i.e. with kinetic energy substantially exceeding $k$ (the Boltzmann constant) over any temperature in the system. The paper studies…
We simulate numerically convection in a rectangular cell filled with an ideal gas rotating about an axis perpendicular to the direction of gravity. This configuration corresponds to an experiment with a convection cell placed in a rapidly…
We developed an experiment to study different aspects of granular matter under microgravity. The 1.5U small experiment was carried out on the International Space Station. About 3500 almost identical spherical glass particles with 856 um…
In a granular gas, inelastic collisions produce an instability in which the constituent particles cluster heterogeneously. These clusters then interact with each other, further decreasing their kinetic energy. We report experiments of the…
When a giant planet forms in a protoplanetary disks, it carves a gap around its orbit separating the disk into two parts: inner disk and outer disk. Traditional disk accretion models, which assume material transport is driven by viscosity,…
Mutually repelling particles form spontaneously ordered clusters when forced into confinement. The clusters may adopt similar spatial arrangements even if the underlying particle interactions are contrastingly different. Here we demonstrate…
Stars are generally spherical, yet their gaseous envelopes often appear non-spherical when ejected near the end of their lives. This quirk is most notable during the planetary nebula phase when these envelopes become ionized. Interactions…
In general, the total kinetic energy in a multicomponent granular gas of inelastic and rough hard spheres is unequally partitioned among the different degrees of freedom. On the other hand, partial energy equipartition can be reached, in…
A recent experiment [Son et al., Soft Matter, 2024, 20,2777-2788] showed that self-propelled particles confined within a circular boundary filled with granular medium spontaneously form a motile cluster that stays on the boundary. This…
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…
In the incremental growth model, planetesimal formation constitutes the least understood step in the process of planetary formation. The two main difficulties in this regard are the collision/fragmentation and the drift barriers. Numerous…
We study a quasi-two-dimensional macroscopic system of magnetic spherical particles settled on a shallow concave dish under a temporally oscillating magnetic field. The system reaches a stationary state where the energy losses from…
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…
Under many conditions, macroscopic grains flow like a fluid; kinetic theory pred icts continuum equations of motion for this granular fluid. In order to test the theory, we perform event driven molecular simulations of a two-dimensional gas…
A gravity-driven flow of grains through a narrow pipe in vacuum is studied by means of a one-dimensional model with two coefficients of restitution. Numerical simulations show clearly how density waves form when a strikingly simple…
Planet formation may begin much earlier than previously expected, when the protoplanetary disk is still massive and gravitationally unstable. It has been proposed that solid grains can concentrate in the spiral arms of self-gravitating…
Binary solar system objects are common and range from satellite systems with very large mass ratios $M_1/M_2$ to mass ratios very close to unity. A well-known example of a binary is the Pluto-Charon system. With Charon only eight times less…
We analyze reversibility of both displacements and rotations of spherical grains in three-dimensional compression experiments. Using transparent acrylic beads with cylindrical holes and index matching techniques, we are not only capable of…
This paper presents an overview of recent computer simulations of grain boundary (GB) diffusion focusing on atomistic understanding of diffusion mechanisms. At low temperatures when GB structure is ordered, diffusion is mediated by point…