Elasticity of a system with non-central potentials

Abstract

We derive expressions for determination of the stress and the elastic constants in systems composed of particles interacting via non-central two-body potentials as thermal averages of products of first and second partial derivatives of the interparticle potentials and components of the interparticle separation vectors. These results are adapted to hard potentials, when the stress and the elastic constants are expressed as thermal averages of the components of normals to contact surfaces between the particles and components of vectors separating the centers of the particles. The averages require the knowledge of simultaneous contact probabilities of two pairs of particles. We apply the expressions to particles for which a contact function can be defined, and demonstrate the feasibility of the method by computing the stress and the elastic constants of a two-dimensional system of hard ellipses using Monte Carlo simulations.