Pattern dynamics of cohesive granular particles under a plane shear

Abstract

We perform three dimensional molecular dynamics simulations of cohesive granular particles under a plane shear. From the simulations, we found that the granular temperature of the system abruptly decreases to zero after reaching the critical temperature, where the characteristic time $t_{\rm cl}$ is approximately represented by $t_{\rm cl} \propto (\zeta-\zeta_{\rm cr})^{-\beta}$ with the dissipation rate $\zeta$, the critical dissipation rate $\zeta_{\rm cr}$ and the exponent $\beta \simeq 0.8$. We also found that there exist a variety types of clusters depending on the initial density and the dissipation rate.