Elastodynamics from Eulerian Poisson-bracket formalism: application to chiral odd solids

Abstract

The Poisson-bracket (PB) formalism is widely used to derive dynamics of coarse-grained (CG) fields to capture large-scale physics, extending the role of PBs in classical particle mechanics to macroscopic fields. It has been applied to fluctuations in critical phenomena, hydrodynamics of liquid crystals, liquid crystal elastomers, tissues, and the emergence of odd viscosity from spinning particles. The PB formalism can be formulated in either the Lagrangian framework, using reference space, or the Eulerian framework, using real space. Conventionally, the Lagrangian formulation is used for elastic solids, and the Eulerian one for fluids. However, growing interest in Eulerian descriptions of solids has emerged for phenomena naturally defined in real space, such as viscoelastic responses, moving interfaces, and field-induced structural changes in particles. Here we develop a systematic formulation for applying the Eulerian PB formalism to elastic systems with potentials typically written in Lagrangian space, and clarify its consistency with the Lagrangian counterpart. We show that the Eulerian formulation generates additional nonlinearities absent in the Lagrangian framework. Such nonlinearities originate from CG volume changes under coordinate transformation and from particle flow across neighboring CG volumes. They must be retained when nonlinear effects are important. To illustrate, we study chiral active solids of finite-sized particles, where active torques drive internal particle rotations and generate geometric nonlinearities. These nonlinearities give rise to the odd elastic modulus, which non-reciprocally couples two different shear modes in stress-strain response. By recovering this modulus directly from the Eulerian PB formalism, we demonstrate its ability to capture emergent nonlinear elastic behavior in driven active solids, whose stresses are naturally measured in real space.