  Granular materials have been studied for decades, also driven by industrial
and technological applications. These very simple systems, composed by
agglomerations of mesoscopic particles, are characterized, in specific regimes,
by a large number of metastable states and an extreme sensitivity (e.g., in
sound transmission) on the arrangement of grains; they are not substantially
affected by thermal phenomena, but can be controlled by mechanical
solicitations. Laser emission from shaken granular matter is so far unexplored;
here we provide experimental evidence that it can be affected and controlled by
the status of motion of the granular, we also find that competitive random
lasers can be observed. We hence demonstrate the potentialities of gravity
affected moving disordered materials for optical applications, and open the
road to a variety of novel interdisciplinary investigations, involving modern
statistical mechanics and disordered photonics.
