Revisiting the first-principles approach to the granular gas steady state

Abstract

We extend a Fokker-Planck formalism, previously used to describe the behavior of a cooling granular gas, with a Hertzian contact potential and viscoelastic radial friction, giving a velocity dependent coefficient of restitution. In the present work, we study the more general case of a steady-state with finite kinetic energy, far from equilibrium, due to the coupling to an external energy-feeding mechanism. Also from first-principles, we extend the validity of the former results.