Abstract
This article presents a calculation of the elastic moduli of a monatomic fluid of rigid spheres. Although calculations for monatomic systems with a continuous and differentiable interatomic potential indicate that the elastic moduli become infinite as the potential becomes infinitely repulsive, we find that the hard-sphere moduli are nonsingular, and well defined. This result leads one to suspect that a fluid with a highly repulsive, but continuous and differentiable, interatomic potential may not always be even qualitatively represented by a fluid consisting of perfectly rigid spheres. Our method of attack consists of finding the general form of the stress tensor for a hard-sphere system, asserting the assumptions of local equilibrium, and expanding the stress tensor in terms of the strains using the techniques developed by Green.
Published Version
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