Energy balance invariance for interacting particle systems

Abstract

This paper studies the principle of invariance of balance of energy and its consequences for a system of interacting particles under groups of transformations. Balance of energy and its invariance is first examined in Euclidean space. Unlike the case of continuous media, it is shown that conservation and balance laws do not follow from the assumption of invariance of balance of energy under time-dependent isometries of the ambient space. However, the postulate of invariance of balance of energy under arbitrary diffeomorphisms of the ambient (Euclidean) space, does yield the correct conservation and balance laws. These ideas are then extended to the case when the ambient space is a Riemannian manifold. Pairwise interactions in the case of geodesically complete Riemannian ambient manifolds are defined by assuming that the interaction potential explicitly depends on the pairwise distances of particles. Postulating balance of energy and its invariance under arbitrary time-dependent spatial diffeomorphisms yields balance of linear momentum. It is seen that pairwise forces are directed along tangents to geodesics at their end points. One also obtains a discrete version of the Doyle–Ericksen formula, which relates the magnitude of internal forces to the rate of change of the interatomic energy with respect to a discrete metric that is related to the background metric.

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