Loosely speaking, the Mpemba effect appears when hotter systems cool sooner or, in a more abstract way, when systems further from equilibrium relax faster. In this paper, we investigate the Mpemba effect in a molecular gas with nonlinear drag, both analytically (by employing the tools of kinetic theory) and numerically (direct simulation Monte Carlo of the kinetic equation and event-driven molecular dynamics). The analysis is carried out via two alternative routes, recently considered in the literature: first, the kinetic or thermal route, in which the Mpemba effect is characterized by the crossing of the evolution curves of the kinetic temperature (average kinetic energy), and, second, the stochastic thermodynamics or entropic route, in which the Mpemba effect is characterized by the crossing of the distance to equilibrium in probability space. In general, a nonmutual correspondence between the thermal and entropic Mpemba effects is found, i.e., there may appear the thermal effect without its entropic counterpart or vice versa. Furthermore, a nontrivial overshoot with respect to equilibrium of the thermal relaxation makes it necessary to revise the usual definition of the thermal Mpemba effect, which is shown to be better described in terms of the relaxation of the local equilibrium distribution. Our theoretical framework, which involves an extended Sonine approximation in which not only the excess kurtosis but also the sixth cumulant is retained, gives an excellent account of the behavior observed in simulations.

We study the conditions under which a Mpemba-like effect emerges in granular gases of inelastic and rough hard disks driven by a class of thermostats characterized by the splitting of the noise intensity into translational and rotational counterparts. Thus, granular particles are affected by a stochastic force and a stochastic torque, which inject translational and rotational energy, respectively. We realize that a certain choice of a thermostat of this class can be characterized just by the total intensity and the fraction of noise transferred to the rotational degree of freedom with respect to the translational ones. Firstly, Mpemba effect is characterized by the appearance of a crossing between the temperature curves of the considered samples. Later, an overshoot of the temperature evolution with respect to the steady-state value is observed and the mechanism of Mpemba effect generation is changed. The choice of parameters allows us to design plausible protocols based on these thermostats for generating the initial states to observe the Mpemba-like effect in experiments. In order to obtain explicit results, we use a well-founded Maxwellian approximation for the evolution dynamics and the steady-state quantities. Finally, theoretical results are compared with direct simulation Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics results, and a very good agreement is found.

Conditions for the stability under linear perturbations around the homogeneous cooling state are studied for dilute granular gases of inelastic and rough hard disks or spheres with constant coefficients of normal ($\alpha$) and tangential ($\beta$) restitution. After a formally exact linear stability analysis of the Navier–Stokes–Fourier hydrodynamic equations in terms of the translational ($d_t$) and rotational ($d_r$) degrees of freedom, the transport coefficients derived in the companion paper [A. Megías and A. Santos, “Hydrodynamics of granular gases of inelastic and rough hard disks or spheres. I. Transport coefficients” Phys. Rev. E 104, 034901 (2021)] are employed. Known results for hard spheres [Garzó, Santos, and Kremer, Phys. Rev. E 97, 052901 (2018)] are recovered by setting $d_t=d_r=3$, while novel results for hard disks ($d_t=2, d_r=1$) are obtained. In the latter case, a high-inelasticity peculiar region in the $(\alpha ,\beta )$ parameter space is found, inside which the critical wave number associated with the longitudinal modes diverges. Comparison with event-driven molecular dynamics simulations for dilute systems of hard disks at $\alpha =0.2$ shows that this theoretical region of absolute instability may be an artifact of the extrapolation to high inelasticity of the approximations made in the derivation of the transport coefficients, although it signals a shrinking of the conditions for stability. In the case of moderate inelasticity ($\alpha =0.7$), however, a good agreement between the theoretical predictions and the simulation results is found.