Long ranged stress correlations in the hard sphere liquid

Abstract

The smooth emergence of shear elasticity is an hallmark of the liquid to glass transition. In a liquid, viscous stresses arise from local structural rearrangements. In the solid, Eshelby has shown that stresses around an inclusion decay as a power law $r^{-D}$, where $D$ is the dimension of the system. We study glass-forming hard sphere fluids by simulation and observe the emergence of the unscreened power-law Eshelby pattern in the stress correlations of the isotropic liquid state. By a detailed tensorial analysis, we show that the fluctuating force field, viz.~the divergence of the stress field, relaxes to zero with time in all states, while the shear stress correlations develop spatial power-law structures inside regions that grow with longitudinal and transverse sound speeds; we observe the predicted exponents $r^{-D}$ and $r^{-D-2}$. In Brownian systems, shear stresses relax diffusively within these regions, with the diffusion coefficient determined by the shear modulus and the friction coefficient.