2 research outputs found
A Geometric Formulation of Quantum Stress Fields
We present a derivation of the stress field for an interacting quantum system
within the framework of local density functional theory. The formulation is
geometric in nature and exploits the relationship between the strain tensor
field and Riemannian metric tensor field. Within this formulation, we
demonstrate that the stress field is unique up to a single ambiguous parameter.
The ambiguity is due to the non-unique dependence of the kinetic energy on the
metric tensor. To illustrate this formalism, we compute the pressure field for
two phases of solid molecular hydrogen. Furthermore, we demonstrate that
qualitative results obtained by interpreting the hydrogen pressure field are
not influenced by the presence of the kinetic ambiguity.Comment: 22 pages, 2 figures. Submitted to Physical Review B. This paper
supersedes cond-mat/000627