Inherent State Research Articles

Inherent stress correlations in a quiescent two-dimensional liquid: Static analysis including finite-size effects.

After constructing a formalism to analyze spatial stress correlations in two-dimensional equilibrated liquids, we show that the sole conjunction of mechanical balance and material isotropy demands all anisotropic components of the inherent state (IS) stress autocorrelation matrix to decay at long range as 1/r^{2} in the large system size limit. Furthermore, analyzing numerical simulation data for an equilibrated supercooled liquid, we bring evidence that, in finite-sized periodic systems, the autocorrelations of pressure and shear stresses present uniform backgrounds of amplitudes proportional to the inverse cell area. These backgrounds bring relevant contributions to macroscopic IS stress fluctuations, with the consequence that the latter scale as inverse area, yet in an anomalous way, inconsistent with viewing an IS as equivalent, in the thermodynamic limit, to an ensemble of independent finite-sized subsystems. In that sense, ISs are not spatially ergodic.