Instabilities in a free granular fluid described by the Enskog equation.

A linear stability analysis of the hydrodynamic equations with respect to the homogeneous cooling state is carried out to identify the conditions for stability as functions of the wave vector, the dissipation, and the density. In contrast to previous studies, this description is based on the results derived from the Enskog equation for inelastic hard spheres [V. Garzó and J. W. Dufty, Phys. Rev. E 59, 5895 (1999)], which takes into account the dependence of the transport coefficients on dissipation. As expected, linear stability shows two transversal (shear) modes and a longitudinal "heat") mode to be unstable with respect to long enough wavelength excitations. Comparison with previous results (which neglect the influence of dissipation on transport) shows quantitative discrepancies for strong dissipation.