Collisional cooling with multi-particle interactions.

An extension to kinetic theory and hydrodynamic models is proposed that accounts for the existence of multi-particle contacts and leads to a correction of the cooling rate. The other hydrodynamic terms remain unchanged. In the presence of multi-particle contacts a class of different models leads to deviations from the classical inelastic hard sphere (IHS) results. For the homogeneous cooling state (HCS), as examined here, the theoretical results are found to be in perfect agreement with the numerical simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]