Symmetry breaking and clustering in a vibrated granular gas with several macroscopically connected compartments

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a vibrated granular gas in three connected compartments spontaneously breaks symmetry, leading to uneven particle distribution, and presents a hydrodynamical model that predicts this bifurcation behavior.

Contribution

The paper introduces a hydrodynamical model that accurately predicts symmetry breaking and clustering in a vibrated granular gas with multiple compartments.

Findings

Particles concentrate in one compartment at high particle numbers

The model predicts the bifurcation diagram of the system

Theory extends to any number of compartments

Abstract

The spontaneous symmetry breaking in a vibro-fluidized low-density granular gas in three connected compartments is investigated. When the total number of particles in the system becomes large enough, particles distribute themselves unequally among the three compartments. Particles tend to concentrate in one of the compartments, the other two having the (relatively small) same average number of particles. A hydrodynamical model that accurately predicts the bifurcation diagram of the system is presented. The theory can be easily extended to the case of an arbitrary number of connected compartments.