Elastic moduli of a liquid–vapor interface

Abstract

The elastic moduli introduced by previous authors for a uniform fluid are generalized to the case of a two‐phase system. For a planar liquid–vapor interface, we obtained five independent surface moduli, one of which is the surface tension. The presence of four additional moduli results from the fact that at every stage the surface phase is described as a thin layer and not, like in thermodynamics, as a two‐dimensional phase.