The Bare Diffusion Coefficient and the Peculiar Velocity Auto-Correlation Function

Abstract

The bare diffusion coefficient is given as the time integral of the peculiar velocity autocorrelation function or PVACF and this result is different from the well known Green-Kubo formula. The bare diffusion coefficient characterizes the diffusion process on a length scale lambda. The PVACF is given here for the first time in terms of the positions and velocities of the N particles of the system so the PVACF is in a form suitable for evaluation by molecular dynamics simulations. The computer simulations show that for the two dimensional hard disk system, the PVACF decays increasingly rapidly in time as lambda is reduced and this is probably a general characteristic.