We report the experimental observation of vortex patterns in vertically vibrated granular rods. Above a critical packing fraction, moving ordered domains of nearly vertical rods spontaneously form and coexist with horizontal rods. The domains of vertical rods coarsen in time to form large vortices. We investigate the conditions under which the vortices occur by varying the number of rods, vibration amplitude, and frequency. The size of the vortices increases with the number of rods. We characterize the growth of the ordered domains by measuring the area fraction of the ordered regions as a function of time. A void-filling model is presented to describe the nucleation and growth of the vertical domains. We track the ends of the vertical rods and obtain the velocity fields of the vortices. The rotation speed of the rods is observed to depend on the vibration velocity of the container and on the packing. To investigate the impact of the direction of driving on the observed phenomena, we performed experiments with the container vibrated horizontally. Although vertical domains form, vortices are not observed. We therefore argue that the motion is generated due to the interaction of the inclination of the rods with the bottom of a vertically vibrated container. We also perform simple experiments with a single row of rods in an annulus. These experiments directly demonstrate that the rod motion is generated when the rods are inclined from the vertical, and is always in the direction of the inclination.
We report the spatiotemporal response of Bacillus subtilis growing on a nutrient-rich layer of agar to ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Below a crossover temperature, the bacteria are confined to regions that are shielded from UV radiation. A forced convection of the population is effected by rotating a UV radiation shield relative to the Petri dish. The extinction speed at which the bacterial colony lags behind the shield is found to be qualitatively similar to the front velocity of the colony growing in the absence of a hostile environment as predicted by the model of Dahmen, Nelson, and Shnerb. A quantitative comparison is not possible without considering the slow dynamics and time-dependent interaction of the population with the hostile environment.
We experimentally study the spectral properties of a mixed system using the flexural modes of a clover shaped plate. The system is called mixed because the corresponding ray dynamics has both chaotic and integrable regions in its phase space. The eigenvalue statistics show intermediate properties between the universal statistics corresponding to chaotic geometries which show Gaussian orthogonal ensemble statistics and integrable geometries that show Poisson statistics. We further investigate the Fourier transform of the peaks to study the influence of the length scales of the plate on the properties of the acoustic resonances. We observe a weak signal of the periodic orbits in the experimental data. Although some of the peaks in the Fourier transform of the eigenvalue spectrum correspond to the shortest stable periodic orbits, other strong peaks are also observed. To understand the role of symmetries, we start with a clover shaped plate belonging to the C(4v) point symmetry group, and progressively reduce the symmetry by sanding one of the edges. A Shnirelman peak in P(s) is observed for the highly symmetric situation due to level clustering.
We report the first definitive experimental observation of periodic orbits (POs) in the spectral properties of an elastodynamic system. The Fourier transform of the density of flexural modes show peaks that correspond to stable and unstable POs of a clover shaped quartz plate. We change the shape of the plate and find that the peaks corresponding to the POs that hit only the unperturbed sides are unchanged proving the correspondence. However, an exact match to the length of the main POs could be made only after a small rescaling of the experimental results. Statistical analysis of the level dynamics also shows the effect of the stable POs. PACS number(s): 05.45.+b,05.45.Mt,46.40.-f Typeset using REVT E X
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