Buoyancy driven convection in vertically shaken granular matter

Buoyancy driven granular convection is studied for a shallow, vertically shaken granular bed in a quasi-two-dimensional container. At sufficiently strong shaking counter-rotating convection rolls form with pronounced density variations. These rolls are also found in molecular dynamics simulations. The onset of convection is analyzed through a linear stability analysis of the hydrodynamic continuum model presented in Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 258001 (2005). There is very good agreement between experiments, simulations, and theory.