Symmetry breaking and coarsening of clusters in a prototypical driven granular gas

TL;DR

This paper investigates symmetry-breaking and coarsening phenomena in a driven granular gas, revealing bifurcation behaviors and the evolution toward a single dense cluster in a 2D system.

Contribution

It identifies and computes super- and subcritical bifurcations in a driven granular gas, advancing understanding of cluster formation and coarsening dynamics.

Findings

Symmetry-breaking bifurcations are characterized and computed.

Coarsening leads to a single dense cluster in steady state.

Bifurcation types influence the final cluster configuration.

Abstract

Granular hydrodynamics predicts symmetry-breaking instability in a two-dimensional (2D) ensemble of nearly elastically colliding smooth hard spheres driven, at zero gravity, by a rapidly vibrating sidewall. Super- and subcritical symmetry-breaking bifurcations of the simple clustered state are identified, and the supercritical bifurcation curve is computed. The cluster dynamics proceed as a coarsening process mediated by the gas phase. Far above the bifurcation point the final steady state, selected by coarsening, represents a single strongly localized densely packed 2D cluster.