Granular Chains

E. Ben-Naim, Z. A. Daya, and R.E. Ecke

Granular chains are made of hollow steel balls connected by thin metal rods. They can be purchased at your neighborhood hardware store. Add a shaker and a little bit of imagination and you have a rich laboratory for polymer physics, nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, nonlinear dynamics, and biological physics. The attached video and the brief summaries below highlight a series of our recent experiments in vibrated granular chains.


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