What is liquid? Lyapunov instability reveals symmetry-breaking irreversibilities hidden within Hamilton's many-body equations of motion

Typical Hamiltonian liquids display exponential "Lyapunov instability", also called "sensitive dependence on initial conditions". Although Hamilton's equations are thoroughly time-reversible, the forward and backward Lyapunov instabilities can differ, qualitatively. In numerical work, the expected forward/backward pairing of Lyapunov exponents is also occasionally violated. To illustrate, we consider many-body inelastic collisions in two space dimensions. Two mirror-image colliding crystallites can either bounce, or not, giving rise to a single liquid drop, or to several smaller droplets, depending upon the initial kinetic energy and the interparticle forces. The difference between the forward and backward evolutionary instabilities of these problems can be correlated with dissipation and with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Accordingly, these asymmetric stabilities of Hamilton's equations can provide an "Arrow of Time". We illustrate these facts for two small crystallites colliding so as to make a warm liquid. We use a specially-symmetrized form of Levesque and Verlet's bit-reversible Leapfrog integrator. We analyze trajectories over millions of collisions with several equally-spaced time reversals.Comment: 13 pages and 11 figures, prepared for Douglas Henderson's 80th Birthday Symposium at Brigham Young University in August 2014 revised to incorporate referee's suggestions as an acknowledgmen

Time-Reversible Random Number Generators : Solution of Our Challenge by Federico Ricci-Tersenghi

Nearly all the evolution equations of physics are time-reversible, in the sense that a movie of the solution, played backwards, would obey exactly the same differential equations as the original forward solution. By way of contrast, stochastic approaches are typically not time-reversible, though they could be made so by the simple expedient of storing their underlying pseudorandom numbers in an array. Here we illustrate the notion of time-reversible random number generators. In Version 1 we offered a suitable reward for the first arXiv response furnishing a reversed version of an only slightly-more-complicated pseudorandom number generator. Here we include Professor Ricci-Tersenghi's prize-winning reversed version as described in his arXiv:1305.1805 contribution: "The Solution to the Challenge in `Time-Reversible Random Number Generators' by Wm. G. Hoover and Carol G. Hoover".Comment: Seven pages with a single Figure, dedicated to the memories of our late colleague Ian Snoo

2D and 3D Dense-Fluid Shear Flows via Nonequilibrium Molecular Dynamics. Comparison of Time-and-Space-Averaged Tensor Temperature and Normal Stresses from Doll's, Sllod, and Boundary-Driven Shear Algorithms

Homogeneous shear flows (with constant strainrate du/dy) are generated with the Doll's and Sllod algorithms and compared to corresponding inhomogeneous boundary-driven flows. We use one-, two-, and three-dimensional smooth-particle weight functions for computing instantaneous spatial averages. The nonlinear stress differences are small, but significant, in both two and three space dimensions. In homogeneous systems the sign and magnitude of the shearplane stress difference, P(xx) - P(yy), depend on both the thermostat type and the chosen shearflow algorithm. The Doll's and Sllod algorithms predict opposite signs for this stress difference, with the Sllod approach definitely wrong, but somewhat closer to the (boundary-driven) truth. Neither of the homogeneous shear algorithms predicts the correct ordering of the kinetic temperatures, T(xx) > T(zz) > T(yy).Comment: 34 pages with 12 figures, under consideration by Physical Review