The onset of condensation of hard spheres in a gravitational field is studied using density-functional theory (DFT). We find that the local density approximation yields results identical to those obtained previously using the kinetic theory [Physica A 271, 192, (1999)], and a weighted density-functional theory gives qualitatively similar results, namely, that the temperature at which condensati...

We report a novel experimental study on the jamming transition of dry fine powders with controlled attractive energy and particle size. Like in attractive colloids dry fine particles experience diffusion-limited clustering in the fluidlike regime. At the jamming threshold fractal clusters crowd in a metastable state at volume fractions depending on attractive energy and close to the volume frac...

Irradiation of a planar solid by an intense laser pulse leads to fast electron acceleration and hard x-ray production. We have investigated whether this high field production of fast electrons can be controlled by introducing dielectric spheres of well-defined size on the target surface. We find that the presence of spheres with a diameter slightly larger than half the laser wavelength leads to...

We consider a dynamical interacting particle system whose empirical distribution tends to the solution of a spatially homogeneous Boltzmann type equation, as the number of particles tends to infinity. These laws of large numbers were proved for the Maxwellian molecules by H. Tanaka ([Ta1]) and for the hard spheres by A.S. Sznitman ([Sz1]). In the present paper we investigate the corresponding l...

In the real world, diffusion-limited reactions in chemistry and biology mostly occur in crowded environments, such as macromolecular complex formation in the cell. Despite the paramount importance of such phenomena, theoretical approaches still mainly rely on the Smoluchowski theory, only valid in the infinite dilution limit. In this paper we introduce a novel theoretical framework to describe ...

In the preceding paper, linear response methods have been applied to obtain formally exact expressions for the parameters of Navier-Stokes order hydrodynamics. The analysis there is general, applying to both normal and granular fluids with a wide range of collision rules. Those results are specialized here to the case of smooth, inelastic, hard spheres with constant coefficient of normal restit...

We investigate the properties of the collision operator Q associated to the linear Boltzmann equation for dissipative hard-spheres arising in granular gas dynamics. We establish that, as in the case of non–dissipative interactions, the gain collision operator is an integral operator whose kernel is made explicit. One deduces from this result a complete picture of the spectrum of Q in an Hilbert...

In the Brazil nut problem (BNP), hard spheres with larger diameters rise to the top. There are various explanations (percolation, reorganization, convection), but a broad understanding or control of this effect is by no means achieved. A theory is presented for the crossover from BNP to the reverse Brazil nut problem based on a competition between the percolation effect and the condensation of ...

Title of thesis : Simulation of random packing of hard spheres using Monte Carlo method Sung-Ho Park, Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering, 1990 Thesis directed by : Dr.Anthony D. Rosato, Assistant Professor Mechanical Engineering Department. A computer based method of generating a random packing of hard spheres is described. Using a Monte Carlo method as employed in the field of Computa...

A correlation between maxima in virial coefficients (Bn), and “kissing” numbers for hard hyper-spheres up to dimension D = 5, indicates a virial equation and close-packing relationship. Known virial coefficients up to B7, both for hard parallel cubes and squares, indicate that the limiting differences Bn – B(n-1) behave similar to spheres and disks, in the respective expansions relative to maxi...