  The stability of convection rolls in a fluid heated from below is limited by
secondary instabilities, including the skew-varicose and crossroll
instabilities. We observe a stability boundary defined by the same
instabilities in stripe patterns in a vertically oscillated granular layer.
Molecular dynamics simulations show that the mechanism of the skew-varicose
instability in granular patterns is similar to that in convection. These
results suggest that pattern formation in granular media can be described by
continuum models analogous to those used in fluid systems.
