Testing the Edwards hypothesis in spin systems under tapping dynamics

Johannes Berg, Silvio Franz, Mauro Sellitto

Published 2001-11-26, updated 2002-04-23Version 2

The Edwards hypothesis of ergodicity of blocked configurations for gently tapped granular materials is tested for abstract models of spin systems on random graphs and spin chains with kinetic constraints. The tapping dynamics is modeled by considering two distinct mechanisms of energy injection: thermal and random tapping. We find that ergodicity depends upon the tapping procedure (i.e. the way the blocked configurations are dynamically accessed): for thermal tapping ergodicity is a good approximation, while it fails to describe the asymptotic stationary state reached by the random tapping dynamics.