Dynamics of a hard sphere granular impurity.pdfVIP

Dynamics of a hard sphere granular impurity Andr´es Santos∗ Departamento de F´ısica, Universidad de Extremadura, E–06071 Badajoz, Spain James W. Dufty† 6 0 Department of Physics, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 0 (Dated: February 6, 2008) 2 An impurity particle coupling to its host fluid via inelastic hard sphere collisions is considered. It is l shown that the exact equation for its distribution function can be mapped onto that for an impurity u with elastic collisions and an effective mass. Application of this result to the Enskog–Lorentz kinetic J equation leads to several conclusions: 1) every solution in the elastic case is equivalent to a class 7 of solutions in the granular case; 2) for an equilibrium host fluid the granular impurity approaches 1 equilibrium at a different temperature, with a dominant diffusive mode at long times; 3) for a granular host fluid in its scaling state, the granular impurity approaches the corresponding scaling ] h solution. c e PACS numbers: 45.70.Mg, 47.57.Gc, 05.20.Dd, 51.10.+y m t- Granular fluids are the subject of growing attention us- where the effective mass is a ing a variety of experimental, numerical, and theoretical t ∗