It has been suggested that for fluids in which the rate of strain varies appreciably over length scales of the order of the intermolecular interaction range, the viscosity must be treated as a nonlocal property of the fluid. The shear stress can then be postulated to be a convolution of this nonlocal viscosity kernel with the strain rate over all space. In this Letter, we confirm that this postulate is correct by a combination of analytical and numerical methods for an atomic fluid out of equilibrium. Furthermore, we show that a gradient expansion of the nonlocal constitutive equation gives a reasonable approximation to the shear stress in the small wave vector limit.

• Received 8 November 2007

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.195901