Casimir-like force between intruders in granular gases

Abstract

We numerically study a two-dimensional granular gas of rigid disks where an external driving force is applied to each particle in such a way that the system is driven into a steady state by balancing the energy input and the dissipation due to inelastic collisions. Two intruder particles embedded in this correlated medium experience a fluctuation-induced force -- that is itself a fluctuating quantity -- due to the confinement of the hydrodynamic fluctuations between them. We find that the probability distribution of this force is a Gaussian centered on a value that is proportional to the steady-state temperature and grows logarithmically with system size. We investigate the effect of the other relevant parameters and estimate the force using the Fourier transform of the fluctuating hydrodynamic fields.