Equilibrating Temperaturelike Variables in Jammed Granular Subsystems

Abstract

Although jammed granular systems are athermal, several thermodynamic-like descriptions have been proposed which make quantitative predictions about the distribution of volume and stress within a system and provide a corresponding temperature-like 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 alternately dilating and re-compacting the system through a series of boundary displacements. Within each configuration, a bath of particles surrounds a smaller subsystem of particles with a different inter-particle 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 inter-particle contact. By comparing the temperature-like 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.

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Nonequilibrium identities and response theory for dissipative particles

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“…12,13 More recently, the applied force has been decomposed into the normal and tangential components using a computational image matching method. 14,16 Relations among the shearing, isotropic compression, and jamming have been intensively studied using photoelastic disks. [14][15][16][17][18] To the best of our knowledge, however, the tapping-induced granular compaction has not been studied with photoelastic disks.…”