RigidityinSolidsbyDavidAristoffandCharles-Department.PDFVIP

Rigidity in Solids by David Aristoff and Charles Radin * Mathematics Department, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712 Abstract We address the question of whether solids may be distinguished from fluids by their response to shear stress. * Research supported in part by NSF Grant DMS-0700120 I. Introduction Our focus is the theoretical modeling, within statistical mechanics, of the solid/fluid phase transition of matter in thermal equilibrium, for instance the ice/water transition, at high pressure and temperature, and in particular the use of rigidity to distinguish the phases. There are no analytic proofs of a solid/fluid transition in any statistical me- chanics model which uses particles in space interacting through simple short range forces (see however [1]), though there are many simulations showing the transition, both Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics. Since we concentrate on the transi- tion at high pressure and temperature, at which short range repulsion dominates the interparticle interaction, the classical hard sphere model is appropriate [2, page 84]; again there are no proofs of a phase transition in this model, but there are many simulations [2,3]. Traditionally such a transition is “understood” theoreti- cally through an order parameter associated with some global (emergent) property of the bulk material, in particular the molecular-level crystalline symmetry which can be detected experimentally in X-ray scattering [4]. This paper follows an alter- native proposal of Anderson [5], namely the use of rigidity, the response to stress, to distinguish the phases, for instance in a hard sphere model. Stress, both pressure and shear, will be understood here as an external influence