Spatial correlations of hydrodynamic fluctuations in simple fluids under shear flow: A mesoscale simulation study.

Hydrodynamic fluctuations in simple fluids under shear flow are demonstrated to be spatially correlated, in contrast to the fluctuations at equilibrium, using mesoscopic hydrodynamic simulations. The simulation results for the equal-time hydrodynamic correlations in a multiparticle collision dynamics (MPC) fluid in shear flow are compared with the explicit expressions obtained from fluctuating hydrodynamics calculations. For large wave vectors k, the nonequilibrium contributions to transverse and longitudinal velocity correlations decay as k^{-4} for wave vectors along the flow direction and as k^{-2} for the off-flow directions. For small wave vectors, a crossover to a slower decay occurs, indicating long-range correlations in real space. The coupling between the transverse velocity components, which vanishes at equilibrium, also exhibits a k^{-2} dependence on the wave vector. In addition, we observe a quadratic dependency on the shear rate of the nonequilibrium contribution to pressure.