Universal scaling dynamics in a perturbed granular gas

Abstract

We study the response of a granular system at rest to an instantaneous input of energy in a localised region. We present scaling arguments that show that, in $d$ dimensions, the radius of the resulting disturbance increases with time $t$ as $t^{\alpha}$, and the energy decreases as $t^{-\alpha d}$, where the exponent $\alpha=1/(d+1)$ is independent of the coefficient of restitution. We support our arguments with an exact calculation in one dimension and event driven molecular dynamic simulations of hard sphere particles in two and three dimensions.