A set of hard spheres with tangential inelastic collision as a model of granular matter: $1/f^\alpha$ fluctuation, non-Gaussian distribution, and convective motion

Abstract

A set of hard spheres with tangential inelastic collision is found to reproduce observations of real and numerical granular matter. After time is scaled so as to cancel energy dissipation due to inelastic collisions out, inelastically colliding hard spheres in two dimensional space come to have $1/f^\alpha$ fluctuation of total energy, non-Gaussian distribution of displacement vectors, and convective motion of spheres, which hard spheres with elastic collision, a conventional model of granular matter, cannot reproduce.