| Wed September 22nd 2010 11:00 ZH286 | Seminar | Still in the sand box: exploring the granular phase space Matthias Schroeter |
Details:A beaker full of sand contains on the order of 100 million individual particles, all interacting according to Newton's laws. This large number raises the hope that there might be a statistical mechanics type description which rationalizes a small number of state variables.Unsurprisingly, there are considerable difficulties in generalizing statistical mechanics to these far from equilibrium systems with macroscopic, dissipative constituents. Adding to the difficulty is that we haven't even a complete "granular thermodynamics" yet. | ||
