Testing the Stokes-Einstein relation with the hard-sphere fluid model.

Abstract

The Stokes-Einstein (SE) relation has been widely applied to quantitatively describe the Brownian motion. Notwithstanding, here we show that even for a simple fluid, the SE relation may fail over a wide range of the Brownian particle's size. Namely, although the SE relation could be a good approximation for a large enough Brownian particle, a significant error may appear when decreasing the Brownian particle's size down to several hundred times the size of the fluid molecules, and the error increases with the decrease of the Brownian particle's size. The cause is rooted in the fact that the kinetic contribution to the diffusion coefficient is inversely proportional to the squared radius of the Brownian particle. After excluding the kinetic contribution, we show that the applicable range of the SE relation is expanded significantly.