Loosely speaking, the Mpemba effect appears when hotter systems cool sooner or, in a more abstract way, when systems further from equilibrium relax faster. In this paper, we investigate the Mpemba effect in a molecular gas with nonlinear drag, both analytically (by employing the tools of kinetic theory) and numerically (direct simulation Monte Carlo of the kinetic equation and event-driven molecular dynamics). The analysis is carried out via two alternative routes, recently considered in the literature: first, the kinetic or thermal route, in which the Mpemba effect is characterized by the crossing of the evolution curves of the kinetic temperature (average kinetic energy), and, second, the stochastic thermodynamics or entropic route, in which the Mpemba effect is characterized by the crossing of the distance to equilibrium in probability space. In general, a nonmutual correspondence between the thermal and entropic Mpemba effects is found, i.e., there may appear the thermal effect without its entropic counterpart or vice versa. Furthermore, a nontrivial overshoot with respect to equilibrium of the thermal relaxation makes it necessary to revise the usual definition of the thermal Mpemba effect, which is shown to be better described in terms of the relaxation of the local equilibrium distribution. Our theoretical framework, which involves an extended Sonine approximation in which not only the excess kurtosis but also the sixth cumulant is retained, gives an excellent account of the behavior observed in simulations.

Starting from a recent derivation of the energy production rates in terms of the number of translational and rotational degrees of freedom, a comparative study on different granular temperatures in gas mixtures of inelastic and rough disks or spheres is carried out. Both the homogeneous freely cooling state and the state driven by a stochastic thermostat are considered. It is found that the relaxation number of collisions per particle is generally smaller for disks than for spheres, the mean angular velocity relaxing more rapidly than the temperature ratios. In the asymptotic regime of the undriven system, the rotational-translational nonequipartition is stronger in disks than in spheres, while it is hardly dependent on the class of particles in the driven system. On the other hand, the degree of component-component nonequipartition is higher for spheres than for disks, both for driven and undriven systems. A study of the mimicry effect (whereby a multicomponent gas mimics the rotational-translational temperature ratio of a monocomponent gas) is also undertaken.

Finding the proper entropy-like Lyapunov functional associated with the inelastic Boltzmann equation for an isolated freely cooling granular gas is a still unsolved challenge. The original H-theorem hypotheses do not fit here and the H-functional presents some additional measure problems that are solved by the Kullback–Leibler divergence (KLD) of a reference velocity distribution function from the actual distribution. The right choice of the reference distribution in the KLD is crucial for the latter to qualify or not as a Lyapunov functional, the asymptotic “homogeneous cooling state” (HCS) distribution being a potential candidate. Due to the lack of a formal proof far from the quasielastic limit, the aim of this work is to support this conjecture aided by molecular dynamics simulations of inelastic hard disks and spheres in a wide range of values for the coefficient of restitution (α) and for different initial conditions. Our results reject the Maxwellian distribution as a possible reference, whereas they reinforce the HCS one. Moreover, the KLD is used to measure the amount of information lost on using the former rather than the latter, revealing a non-monotonic dependence with α.

Granular gas mixtures modeled as systems of inelastic and rough particles, either hard disks on a plane or hard spheres, are considered. Both classes of systems are embedded in a three-dimensional space (d = 3) but, while in the hard-sphere case the translational and angular velocities are vectors with the same dimensionality (and thus there are d tr = 3 translational and d rot = 3 rotational degrees of freedom), in the hard-disk case the translational velocity vectors are planar (i.e., d tr = 2 translational degrees of freedom) and the angular velocity vectors are orthogonal to the motion plane (i.e., d rot = 1 rotational degree of freedom). This complicates a unified presentation of both classes of systems, in contrast to what happens for smooth, spinless particles, where a treatment of d-dimensional spheres is possible. In this paper, a kinetic-theory derivation of the (collisional) energy production rates ξ tr i j and ξ rot i j (where the indices i and j label different components) in terms of the numbers of degrees of freedom d tr and d rot is presented. Known hard-sphere and hard-disk expressions are recovered by particularizing to (d tr , d rot ) = (3, 3) and (d tr , d rot ) = (2, 1), respectively. Moreover, in the case of spinless particles with d = d tr , known energy production rates ξ tr i j = ξ i j of smooth d-dimensional spheres are also recovered.

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