Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Asymptotic velocity distribution of driven binary granular gases

Apurba Biswas

The Institute of Mathematical Sciences

The velocity distribution of a gas in thermal equilibrium is known to be a gaussian. What is the distribution for an inelastic gas driven to a steady state through external driving? This is a central question in the kinetic theory of driven granular gases. For driven binary systems, experiments have reported different velocity distributions for the different components. The typical experiment consists of two layers: the bottom layer is driven externally while the top layer is excited by the bottom layer. In this talk, we review the experimental data for binary gases. We then propose a simple microscopic model consisting of a mixture of two types of particles. Assuming the well-mixed limit, we determine analytically the asymptotic behaviour of the velocity distribution for both types of particles for different types of driving mechanism. We show that the tails of the velocity distribution for both types of particles have similar behaviour, even though they are driven differently which run counter to the known result.

The talk is based on the preprint ArXiv:1910.07745