Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-2013

Department 1

Physics

Abstract

Although jammed granular systems are athermal, several thermodynamiclike descriptions have been proposed which make quantitative predictions about the distribution of volume and stress within a system and provide a corresponding temperaturelike variable. We perform experiments with an apparatus designed to generate a large number of independent, jammed, two-dimensional configurations. Each configuration consists of a single layer of photoelastic disks supported by a gentle layer of air. New configurations are generated by cyclically dilating, mixing, and then recompacting the system through a series of boundary displacements. Within each configuration, a bath of particles surrounds a smaller subsystem of particles with a different interparticle friction coefficient than the bath. The use of photoelastic particles permits us to find all particle positions as well as the vector forces at each interparticle contact. By comparing the temperaturelike quantities in both systems, we find compactivity (conjugate to the volume) does not equilibrate between the systems, while the angoricity (conjugate to the stress) does. Both independent components of the angoricity are linearly dependent on the hydrostatic pressure, in agreement with predictions of the stress ensemble.

DOI

10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.058001

Required Publisher's Statement

Original version is available from the publisher at: http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.058001

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