We investigate the dynamics of the freely cooling granular gas. For this purpose we diamagnetically levitate the grains providing a terrestrial milligravity environment. At early times we find good agreement with Haff’s law, where the time scale for particle collisions can be determined from independent measurements. At late times, clustering of particles occurs. This can be included in a Haff-like description taking into account the decreasing number of free particles. At very late times, only a single particle determines the dynamics, which is again described by a version of Haff’s law. With this a good description of the data is possible over the whole time range.

• Received 13 March 2008

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.248001