Triboelectric charging occurs in granular systems composed of chemically identical particles even though there is no apparent driving force for charge transfer. We show that such charging can result from nonequilibrium dynamics in which collision-induced electron transfer generates electron accumulation on a particle-size-dependent subset of the system. This idea rationalizes experimental results that suggest that smaller particles charge negatively while the large ones charge positively. This effect occurs generally when there are high energy electrons on a surface that cannot equilibrate to lower energy states on the same surface, but can transfer to lower energy states on other particles during collisions.

• Received 18 July 2007

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.188305