Nonergodic dynamics of force-free granular gases

Abstract: We study analytically and by event-driven molecular dynamics simulations the nonergodic and aging properties of force-free cooling granular gases with both constant and velocity-dependent (viscoelastic) restitution coefficient $\varepsilon$ for particle pair collisions. We compare the granular gas dynamics with an effective single particle stochastic model based on an underdamped Langevin equation with time dependent diffusivity. We find that both models share the same behavior of the ensemble mean squared displacement (MSD) and the velocity correlations in the small dissipation limit. However, we reveal that the time averaged MSD of granular gas particles significantly differs from this effective model due to ballistic correlations for systems with constant $\varepsilon$. For velocity-dependent $\varepsilon$ these corrections become weaker at longer times. Qualitatively the reported non-ergodic behavior is generic for granular gases with any realistic dependence of $\varepsilon$ on the impact velocity.