Super-elastic collisions in a thermally activated system

Abstract

Impact phenomena of small clusters subject to thermal fluctuations are numerically investigated. From the molecular dynamics simulation for colliding two identical clusters, it is found that the restitution coefficient for head-on collisions can exceed unity when the colliding speed is smaller than the thermal velocity of one ``atom'' of the clusters. The averaged behavior can be understood by the quasi-static theory of impact phenomena. It is also confirmed that our result is governed by the fluctuation theorem.