Non-equilibrium molecular dynamics calculation of the shear viscosity of liquid rubidium

The authors report non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations of liquid rubidium using the isokinetic sllod algorithm for the dynamics and the Price potential for the interactions. The three state points simulated are the same three chosen by Bansal and Bruns (1984) who used a quite different non-equilibrium method. However, the authors' results differ substantially from theirs. Specifically, they find that the Price potential consistently predicts better results for the shear viscosity. A more fundamental disagreement between the authors' results and theirs is that the authors' results underestimate the experimental data where theirs overestimate and vice versa. This suggests that the method used by Bansal and Bruns has systematic errors.