Superdiffusive transport and energy localization in disordered granular crystals

We study the spreading of initially localized excitations in one-dimensional disordered granular crystals. We thereby investigate localization phenomena in strongly nonlinear systems, which we demonstrate to be fundamentally different from localization in linear and weakly nonlinear systems. We conduct a thorough comparison of wave dynamics in chains with three different types of disorder: an uncorrelated (Anderson-like) disorder and two types of correlated disorders (which are produced by random dimer arrangements), and for two families of initial conditions: displacement perturbations and velocity perturbations. We find for strongly precompressed (i.e., weakly nonlinear) chains that the dynamics strongly depends on the initial condition. Furthermore, for displacement perturbations, the long-time asymptotic behavior of the second moment m^~2 has oscillations that depend on the type of disorder, with a complex trend that is markedly different from a power law and which is particularly evident for an Anderson-like disorder