United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and International Atomic Energy Agency THE ABDUS SALAM INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR THEORETICAL PHYSICS COLLISION FREQUENCY OF LENNARD-JONES FLUIDS AT HIGH DENSITIES BY EQUILIBRIUM MOLECULAR DYNAMICS SIMULATION

Arising from the inability of theoretical calculations to give accurate descriptions of (shear) viscosity in rare gases at high densities, we investigated the likely cause of discrepancy between theory and experiments. Molecular Dynamics simulations were performed to calculate transport coefficents and collision frequency of rare gases at high densities and different temperatures using a Lennard-Jones modelled pair potential. The results, when compared with experiments show an underestimation of the viscosity calculated through the Green-Kubo formalism, but in agreement with some other calculations performed by other groups. In the present work the origin of the underestimation is considered. Analyses of the transport coefficients show a very high collision frequency which suggests an atom may spend much less time in the neighbourhood of the fields of force of another atom and that the distribution in the systems studied adjusts itself to a nearly Maxwellian type which resulted in a locally and temporarily slowly varying temperature. We show that the time spent in the fields of force is so small compared with relaxation time thereby leading to a possible reduction in local velocity auto-correlation between atoms.