Properties of the Homogeneous Cooling State of a Gas of Inelastic Rough Particles

In this work we address the question of whether a low-density system composed of identical rough particles may reach hydrodynamic states (also called \textit{normal} states), even if energy is not conserved in particle collisions. As a way to measure the ability of the system to present a hydrodynamic behavior, we focus on the so-called homogeneous cooling state of the granular gas and look at the corresponding relaxation time as a function of inelasticity and roughness. We report computer simulation results of the sixth- and eighth-order cumulants of the particle velocity distribution function and study the influence of roughness on their relaxation times and asymptotic values. This extends the results of a previous work [Phys. Rev. E \textbf{89}, 020202(R) (2014], where lower-order cumulants were measured. Our results confirm that the relaxation times are not necessarily longer for stronger inelasticities. This implies that inelasticity by itself does not preclude hydrodynamics. It is also observed that the cumulants associated with the angular velocity distribution may reach very high values in a certain region of (small) roughness and that these maxima coincide with small orientational correlation points.
Comment: 8 pages; 4 figures; contributed paper at the 29th International Symposium on Rarefied Gas Dynamics (Xi'an, China, July 13-18, 2014)