We study the V-shaped wake (Mach cone) formed by a cylindrical rod moving through a thin, vertically vibrated granular layer. The wake, analogous to a shock (hydraulic jump) in shallow water, appears for rod velocities vR ...

We study fluctuations in a vertically oscillated layer of grains below the critical acceleration for the onset of ordered standing waves. As onset is approached, transient disordered waves with a characteristic length scale ...

We use inelastic hard sphere molecular dynamics simulations and laboratory experiments to study patterns in vertically oscillated granular layers. The simulations and experiments reveal that phase bubbles spontaneously ...

We demonstrate that a fluidized bed of hard spheres during defluidization displays properties associated with formation of a glass. The final state is rate dependent, and as this state is approached, the bed exhibits ...

Direct measurements of the acceleration of spheres and disks impacting granular media reveal simple power law scalings along with complex dynamics which bear the signatures of both fluid and solid behavior. The penetration ...

We present a new description of nonequilibrium square patterns as a harmonically coupled crystal lattice. In a vertically oscillating granular layer, different transverse normal modes of the granular square-lattice pattern ...

A statistical description of static granular material requires ergodic sampling of the phase space spanned by the different configurations of the particles. We periodically fluidize a column of glass beads and find that ...

Our experiments and three-dimensional molecular dynamics simulations of particles confined to a vertical monolayer by closely spaced frictional walls (sidewalls) yield velocity distributions with non-Gaussian tails and a ...