Response to Comment on "Long-Lived Giant Number Fluctuations in a Swarming Granular Nematic"

doi:10.1126/science.1154685

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Response to Comment on "Long-Lived Giant Number Fluctuations in a Swarming Granular Nematic"

V. Narayan,¹ S. Ramaswamy,¹ N. Menon²^*

On the basis of experiments using monolayers of spherical grains,Aranson et al. suggest that the giant number fluctuations weobserved in active granular rods may be explained by staticinhomogeneity or inelastic clustering. We refute these alternativeexplanations and underline the evidence that the fluctuationsoriginate in nematic ordering.

¹ Centre for Condensed Matter Theory, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India.
² Department of Physics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA.

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: menon{at}physics.umass.edu

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TECHNICAL COMMENTS Comment on "Long-Lived Giant Number Fluctuations in a Swarming Granular Nematic": I. S. Aranson, A. Snezhko, J. S. Olafsen, and J. S. Urbach (2 May 2008)
Science 320 (5876), 612c. [DOI: 10.1126/science.1153456]
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REPORTS Long-Lived Giant Number Fluctuations in a Swarming Granular Nematic: Vijay Narayan, Sriram Ramaswamy, and Narayanan Menon (6 July 2007)
Science 317 (5834), 105. [DOI: 10.1126/science.1140414]
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