Transport properties in ordinary and supercooled liquids

A satisfactory microscopic theory of transport coefficients in dense fluids requires the consideration both of fast collisional events and of much slower decay mechanisms. In general, such approaches are necessarily complicated; fortunately, in ordinary and moderately supercooled liquids several physical approximations can be made to yield a considerably simpler analysis. This framework has been successfully applied to evaluate the diffusion and shear viscosity coefficients in several typical simple liquids. Further simplications are possible in the case of the diffusion coefficient, which can be expressed analytically. The practical advantages of this approach are illustrated for liquid Cs, obtaining results in good agreement with the observed data.