Self-gravitating static balls of power-law elastic matter

Journal article, 2022

We study a class of power-law stored energy functions for spher-ically symmetric elastic bodies that includes well-known material models, such as the Saint Venant-Kirchhoff, Hadamard, Signorini and John models. We identify a finite subclass of these stored en-ergy functions, which we call Lamé type, that depend on no more material parameters than the bulk modulus k > 0 and the Pois-son ratio —1 < v < 1/2. A general theorem proving the existence of static self-gravitating elastic balls for some power-law materials has been given elsewhere. In this paper numerical evidence is pro-vided that some hypotheses in this theorem are necessary, while others are not.