Radiative Bulk Viscosity

Abstract

Viscous resistance to changes in the volume of a gas arises when different degrees of freedom have different relaxation times. Collisions tend to oppose the resulting departures from equilibrium and, in so doing, generate entropy. Even for a classical gas of hard spheres, when the mean free paths or mean flight times of constituent particles are long, we find a nonvanishing bulk viscosity. Here we apply a method recently used to uncover this result for a classical rarefied gas to radiative transfer theory and derive an expression for the radiative stress tensor for a gray medium with absorption and Thomson scattering. We determine the transport coefficients through the calculation of the comoving entropy generation. When scattering dominates absorption, the bulk viscosity becomes much larger than either the shear viscosity or the thermal conductivity.