Universal Features of Annealing and Aging in Compaction of Granular Piles

TL;DR

This study investigates the aging and annealing behaviors of granular piles, revealing universal features such as glass transition, intermittent relaxation events, and hyperbolic deceleration of event rates, akin to thermal glass systems.

Contribution

It demonstrates that granular compaction exhibits glassy dynamics with universal aging features, including intermittent events and decelerating relaxation rates, similar to thermal glasses.

Findings

Granular piles undergo glass transition and freeze into non-equilibrium states.

Aging dynamics involve logarithmic density increase driven by intermittent 'quakes'.

Event rate decelerates hyperbolically, consistent with a log-Poisson process.

Abstract

We explore the compaction dynamics of a granular pile after a hard quench from a liquid into the glassy regime. First, we establish that the otherwise athermal granular pile during tapping exhibits annealing behavior comparable to glassy polymer or colloidal systems. Like those other systems, the pile undergoes a glass transition and "freezes" into different non-equilibrium glassy states at low agitation for different annealing speeds, starting from the same initial equilibrium state at high agitation. Then, we quench the system instantaneously from the highly-agitated state to below the glass transition regime to study the ensuing aging dynamics. In this classical aging protocol, the density increases (i.e., the potential energy of the pile decreases) logarithmically over several decades in time. Instead of system-wide, thermodynamic measures, here we identify the intermittent, irreversible events ("quakes") that actually drive the glassy relaxation process. We find that the event rate decelerates hyperbolically, which explains the observed increase in density when the integrated contribution to the downward displacements is evaluated. We argue that such a hyperbolically decelerating event rate is consistent with a log-Poisson process, also found as a universal feature of aging in many thermal glasses.