ABSTRACT
Edwards (Edwards 1991) proposed first that a Statistical Mechanics approach (for a review see (Coniglio et al. 2004)) might be feasible to describe dense granular media (Jaeger et al. 1996). He introduced the hypothesis that time averages of a system, exploring its mechanically stable states subject to some external drive (e.g., “tapping”), coincide with suitable ensemble averages over its “blocked states”. The Statistical Mechanics approach to dense granular media was later supported by observations from experiments (Knight et al. 1995; Philippe et al. 2002) and simulations (Nicodemi 1999; Fierro et al. 2002) (for a brief review see (Richard et al. 2005)).
