Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 5322 - 5325 (1999)Sand as Maxwell's Demon
Jens Eggers
We consider a dilute gas of granular material inside a box, kept in a stationary state by vertical vibrations. A wall separates the box into two identical compartments, save for a small hole at some finite height h. As the gas is cooled, a second order phase transition occurs, in which the particles preferentially occupy one side of the box. We develop a quantitative theory of this clustering phenomenon and find good agreement with numerical simulations. ©1999 The American Physical Society
URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.83.5322 See AlsoPhysics News Update: Physics News Update, Number 461, Story #2 (1999). [ Abstract | Previous article | Next article | Issue 25 ] |
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