Impurity in a granular gas under nonlinear Couette flow

We study in this work the transport properties of an impurity immersed in a granular gas under stationary nonlinear Couette flow. The starting point is a kinetic model for low-density granular mixtures recently proposed by the authors [Vega Reyes F et al. 2007 Phys. Rev. E 75 061306]. Two routes have been considered. First, a hydrodynamic or normal solution is found by exploiting a formal mapping between the kinetic equations for the gas particles and for the impurity. We show that the transport properties of the impurity are characterized by the ratio between the temperatures of the impurity and gas particles and by five generalized transport coefficients: three related to the momentum flux (a nonlinear shear viscosity and two normal stress differences) and two related to the heat flux (a nonlinear thermal conductivity and a cross coefficient measuring a component of the heat flux orthogonal to the thermal gradient). Second, by means of a Monte Carlo simulation method we numerically solve the kinetic equations and show that our hydrodynamic solution is valid in the bulk of the fluid when realistic boundary conditions are used. Furthermore, the hydrodynamic solution applies to arbitrarily (inside the continuum regime) large values of the shear rate, of the inelasticity, and of the rest of parameters of the system. Preliminary simulation results of the true Boltzmann description show the reliability of the nonlinear hydrodynamic solution of the kinetic model. This shows again the validity of a hydrodynamic description for granular flows, even under extreme conditions, beyond the Navier-Stokes domain.Comment: 23 pages, 11 figures; v2: Preliminary DSMC results from the Boltzmann equation included, Fig. 11 is ne

Bose-Einstein condensation in antiferromagnets close to the saturation field

At zero temperature and strong applied magnetic fields the ground sate of an anisotropic antiferromagnet is a saturated paramagnet with fully aligned spins. We study the quantum phase transition as the field is reduced below an upper critical $H_{c2}$ and the system enters a XY-antiferromagnetic phase. Using a bond operator representation we consider a model spin-1 Heisenberg antiferromagnetic with single-ion anisotropy in hyper-cubic lattices under strong magnetic fields. We show that the transition at $H_{c2}$ can be interpreted as a Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of magnons. The theoretical results are used to analyze our magnetization versus field data in the organic compound $NiCl_2$-$4SC(NH_2)_2$ (DTN) at very low temperatures. This is the ideal BEC system to study this transition since $H_{c2}$ is sufficiently low to be reached with static magnetic fields (as opposed to pulsed fields). The scaling of the magnetization as a function of field and temperature close to $H_{c2}$ shows excellent agreement with the theoretical predictions. It allows to obtain the quantum critical exponents and confirm the BEC nature of the transition at $H_{c2}$.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure. Accepted for publication in PRB