Browsing by Subject "PACKING"

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    Stationary state volume fluctuations in a granular medium.
    (Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics, 2005-03-30) Schröter, Matthias; Goldman, Daniel I; Swinney, Harry L
    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 the sequence of volume fractions phi of postfluidized states is history independent and Gaussian distributed about a stationary state. The standard deviation of phi exhibits, as a function of phi, a minimum corresponding to a maximum in the number of statistically independent regions. Measurements of the fluctuations enable us to determine the compactivity X , a temperaturelike state variable introduced in the statistical theory of Edwards and Oakeshott [Physica A 157, 1080 (1989)].