Stationary state of a heated granular gas: Fate of the usual H-functional

We consider the characterization of the nonequilibrium stationary state of a randomly driven granular gas in terms of an entropy-production-based variational formulation. Enforcing spatial homogeneity, we first consider the temporal stability of the stationary state reached after a transient. In connection, two heuristic albeit physically motivated candidates for the nonequilibrium entropy production are put forward. It turns out that none of them displays an extremum for the stationary velocity distribution selected by the dynamics. Finally, the relevance of the relative Kullbach entropy is discussed.