0000000000230662
AUTHOR
Madan Rao
Reply to “Comment on ‘Elastic constants from microscopic strain fluctuations’ ”
We agree with Coupier et al. [Phys. Rev. E 81, 013101 (2010)] that their technique for extracting elastic constants from microscopic strain fluctuations improves upon ours because of a more accurate computation of the integral of the elastic correlation function over sub-blocks. However, we believe that their interpretation of the physical relevance of the elastic correlation length extracted from the fits is misleading.
Elastic constants from microscopic strain fluctuations
Fluctuations of the instantaneous local Lagrangian strain $\epsilon_{ij}(\bf{r},t)$, measured with respect to a static ``reference'' lattice, are used to obtain accurate estimates of the elastic constants of model solids from atomistic computer simulations. The measured strains are systematically coarse- grained by averaging them within subsystems (of size $L_b$) of a system (of total size $L$) in the canonical ensemble. Using a simple finite size scaling theory we predict the behaviour of the fluctuations $$ as a function of $L_b/L$ and extract elastic constants of the system {\em in the thermodynamic limit} at nonzero temperature. Our method is simple to implement, efficient and general e…