Localizing energy in granular materials

A device for absorbing and storing short duration impulses in an initially uncompressed one-dimensional granular chain is presented. Simply stated, short regions of sufficiently soft grains are embedded in a hard granular chain. These grains exhibit long-lived standing waves of predictable frequencies regardless of the timing of the arrival of solitary waves from the larger matrix. We explore the origins, symmetry, and energy content of the soft region and its vibrational modes.