Statistical physics of frictional grains: some simple applications of Edwards statistics

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteur principal: Bertin, Eric
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2022
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author Bertin, Eric
author_facet Bertin, Eric
contents 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 significantly different from the equilibrium statistical physics of atomic or molecular systems. We illustrate here on simple models some of the key concepts of the statistical physics introduced by Edwards and coworkers more than thirty years ago to describe shaken granular piles. Quite surprisingly, properties of such frictional systems observed at high effective temperature (i.e., strong shaking) may share some analogies with some low temperature properties of equilibrium systems. For instance, the effective specific heat of non-interacting frictional grains under strong shaking in a harmonic potential goes to zero in the high temperature limit. As a second example, a chain of frictional grains linked by springs exhibits a critical point at infinite effective temperature, at odds with the zero-temperature critical point generically found in one-dimensional equilibrium systems in the presence of local interactions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2204_03086
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Statistical physics of frictional grains: some simple applications of Edwards statistics
Bertin, Eric
Statistical Mechanics
Soft Condensed Matter
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 significantly different from the equilibrium statistical physics of atomic or molecular systems. We illustrate here on simple models some of the key concepts of the statistical physics introduced by Edwards and coworkers more than thirty years ago to describe shaken granular piles. Quite surprisingly, properties of such frictional systems observed at high effective temperature (i.e., strong shaking) may share some analogies with some low temperature properties of equilibrium systems. For instance, the effective specific heat of non-interacting frictional grains under strong shaking in a harmonic potential goes to zero in the high temperature limit. As a second example, a chain of frictional grains linked by springs exhibits a critical point at infinite effective temperature, at odds with the zero-temperature critical point generically found in one-dimensional equilibrium systems in the presence of local interactions.
title Statistical physics of frictional grains: some simple applications of Edwards statistics
topic Statistical Mechanics
Soft Condensed Matter
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.03086