Shear viscosity of the Lennard-Jones fluid near the triple point: Green-Kubo results

The long-standing disagreement over the shear viscosity coefficient of the Lennard-Jones fluid near the triple point is reexamined through a series of very extensive Monte Carlo molecular-dynamics calculations of this transport coefficient based on the Green-Kubo theory. The stress autocorrelation function is shown to exhibit a slow decay, principally in the kinetic-potential and the potential-potential terms, which is large compared with the kinetic-kinetic long-time tail predicted by simple mode-coupling theory. Nonetheless, the viscosity coefficient, exclusive of any correction for this tail for times greater than are accessible numerically, is found to agree with that of Schoen and Hoheisel (who discounted the existence of such a tail) as well as nonequilibrium molecular-dynamics calculations. The large value of the viscosity coefficient found by Levesque and co-workers for 864 particles is brought into statistical agreement with the present results by a modest, but not unrealistic, increase in its statistical uncertainty. The pressure is found to exhibit an anomalous dependence on the size of the system, but the viscosity as well as the self-diffusion constant appear to be linear in the inverse of the number of particles, within the precision of our calculations. The viscosity coefficient, including a long-time-tail contribution based on the extended mode-coupling theory is (3.796±0.068)σ(ɛ/m${)}^{1/2}$ for the Lennard-Jones potential, fitted to a cubic spline, and (3.345±0.068)σ(ɛ/m${)}^{1/2}$ for the potential truncated at 2.5σ.