Broken Symmetry in the Elastic Response to Temperature of Consolidated Granular Media.

When subjected to externally applied forces consolidated granular media (CGM), take a Berea sandstone as example, are elastically soft, unusually nonlinear, and have hysteresis with end point memory. In response to a variety of transient external disturbances CGM exhibit slow dynamics, e.g. log(t) recovery of the strain following a step change in applied pressure. These elastic properties have led to a bricks (sand grains) and mortar (bond system) picture to describe the physics of the system. Because the grains are thermally anisotropic, temperature drives the bond system altogether differently than applied stress. Consequently temperature provides the means to probe new features in the elastic response of CGM. I describe an experiment/analysis in which the temperature, used to probe the elastic state of a CGM, reveals unusual behavior. The elastic state of CGM at fixed applied stress and temperature, is a function of the applied stress protocol and the temperature protocol. Working at constant stress I find that all aspects of the elastic response to temperature exhibit behavior which presents a broad range of time scales, i.e. slow dynamics, and the response to a transient temperature disturbance is asymmetric in the sign of ΔT(t). © 2006 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]