This brief offers a concise presentation of granular fluids from the point of view of non-equilibrium statistical physics. The emphasis is on fluctuations, which can be large in granular fluids due to the small system size (the number of grains is many orders of magnitude smaller than in molecular fluids). Firstly, readers will be introduced to the most intriguing experiments on fluidized g…
A challenging frontier in modern statistical physics concerns systems with a small number of degrees of freedom, far from the thermodynamic limit. Beyond the general interest in the foundation of statistical mechanics, the relevance of this subject is due to the recent increase of resolution in the observation and manipulation of biological and man-made objects at micro- and nano-scales. A pecu…
This brief offers a concise presentation of granular fluids from the point of view of non-equilibrium statistical physics. The emphasis is on fluctuations, which can be large in granular fluids due to the small system size (the number of grains is many orders of magnitude smaller than in molecular fluids). Firstly, readers will be introduced to the most intriguing experiments on fluidized gra…