Granular Particles May Experience Liquid-like Behavior

An experiment conducted by a team from the University of Chicago reported a surprising discovery. Grains of sand can behave in a liquid manner under the right conditions. These kinds of experiments are designed to simulate the birth of the universe and the way matter moved in the first seconds after the Big Bang.

In the experiment the team went to test and better understand the equilibrium phenomenon, which is primarily determined by the temperature and pressure and designed an experiment that goes far beyond the equilibrium state, by using jets of sand that might behave like the quark-gluon plasma that composed the universe a few millionths of a second after its birth, with the big difference that unlike subatomic particles that compose all known matter, grains of sand are much easier to track under precisely controlled conditions.

So far scientists have not had any right concepts to describe the experiment.

In 1883, a paper was published describing an experiment in which a stream of water hitting a narrow circular flat disk turned into the hallow shape of a bell. Scientists asked themselves if streams of granular material would behave the same way.

So graduate students from the University of Chicago created an experiment in which they blasted globs of glass and copper beads through a tube into a flat surface. The results do in fact show the granular material turning into a similar hallow bell shape. The rapid collisions of the densely packed particles produce a liquid state that can be observed.

Similar experiments to study behavior of the quark-gluon plasma structures have been conducted at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, at Brookhaven National Laboratory, by smashing gold atoms into each other at speeds resembling the speed of light. However using granular materials at speeds of no more than 12 miles an hour, has much more advantages than using a particle collider worth 500 million dollars.

The similarities found between the granular-jet and RHIC are kind of a paradox, since classical physics is used to describe interactions of macroscopic level and quantum physics to describe interactions between subatomic particles.