Collision rates in charged granular gases. (Q1421091)

The authors present the answer for collisional cooling, a basic phenomenon, which is responsible for many of the remarkable properties of dilute granular media. They derive the dissipation rate of a charged granular gas, where all charges have the same sign. Compared to the uncharged case the dissipation rate is exponentially suppressed by a Boltzmann factor depending on the ratio between the Coulomb barrier and the granular temperature. The authors indicate that, an imporatant question, which remained open in this paper, concerns the influence of charge transfer processes on the collision statistics. All results are confirmed by computer simulations.