
Unpublished Paper
Power-law velocity distributions in granular gases
Physical Review E
(2005)
Abstract
The kinetic theory of granular gases is studied for spatially homogeneous systems. At large velocities, the equation governing the velocity distribution becomes linear, and it admits stationary solutions with a power-law tail, f(v)∼v−σ. This behavior holds in arbitrary dimension for arbitrary collision rates including both hard spheres and Maxwell molecules. Numerical simulations show that driven steady states with the same power-law tail can be realized by injecting energy into the system at very high energies. In one dimension, we also obtain self-similar time-dependent solutions where the velocities collapse to zero. At small velocities there is a steady state and a power-law tail but at large velocities, the behavior is time dependent with a stretched exponential decay.
Disciplines
Publication Date
2005
Comments
Prepublished version downloaded from ArXiv. Published version is located at http://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.72.021302
Citation Information
E. Ben-Naim, B. Machta and Jonathan Machta. "Power-law velocity distributions in granular gases" Physical Review E (2005) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/joonathan_machta/36/