“Absolute zero” temperature in a vertically vibrated granular system

Abstract

In thermodynamics, absolute zero is the coldest temperature and will never be reached because the thermal motion of microscopic particles never ceases. However, this situation could be changed for a collection of macroscopic particles. In the present paper, an experimental study was performed to explore the possible lowest temperature in a vertically vibrated granular system. It was found that the granular “absolute zero” temperature appears when the vibrating intensity is adjusted to about 4.6 times the gravitational acceleration. At this temperature, the macroscopic particles are arranged closely and behave like a rigid body without relative motions during the vibration. Near the absolute zero, inelastic collisions and energy transfer are responsible for the variation of granular temperature with time and vibrating parameters. Interestingly, the temperature variation reveals that the vibrated macroscopic particles are neither a crystal nor an amorphous system. This study introduces the granular entropy, including entropy generation and entropy flow, to describe the order of the vibrated particles. The entropy change could be illustrated by the temperature profiles of the granular system and its outside. It was also found that, unlike microscopic particles, which could maintain their entropy at a constant temperature, a granular system necessarily behaves completely disordered unless the system achieves the absolute zero granular temperature.