Feitosa Klebert, Menon Narayanan
Department of Physics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003-3720, USA.
Phys Rev Lett. 2002 May 13;88(19):198301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.88.198301. Epub 2002 Apr 24.
We report experiments on the equipartition of kinetic energy in a mixture of pairs of different types of grains vibrated in two dimensions. In general, the two types of grains do not attain the same granular temperature, T(g) = 1/2m<v(2)>. However, the temperature ratio is constant in the bulk of the system and independent of the vibration velocity. The ratio depends strongly on the ratio of mass densities of the grains, but not on their inelasticity. Also, the temperature ratio is insensitive to compositional variables such as the number fraction of each component and the total number density. We conclude that a single granular temperature, as traditionally defined, does not characterize a multicomponent mixture.
