Spatiotemporal Chaotic unjamming and jamming in granular avalanches

Abstract: We have investigated the spatiotemporal chaotic dynamics of unjamming and jamming of particles in a toy-model system -- a rotating drum partially filled with bidisperse disks to create avalanches. The magnitudes of the first Lyapunov vector $\delta u(t)$ and velocity $v(t)$ of particles are directly measured for the first time to yield insights into their spatial correlation $C_{\delta u,v}$, which is stronger near the unjamming but is weaker near the jamming transition, consistent with the recent work of Banigan et al., Nature Phys. $\bf{9}$, 288, (2013). $v(t)$ shows rich dynamics: it grows exponentially for unstable particles and keeps increasing despite stochastic interactions; after the maximum, it decays with large fluctuations. Hence the spatiotemporal chaotic dynamics of avalanche particles are entangled, causing temporal correlations of macroscopic quantities of the system. We propose a simple model for these observations.