 Coaxiality of isotropic elastic stress

The polar decomposition in continuum mechanics and material isotropy remove the reference rotation from an elastic Cauchy stress tensor. Half-turns around principal stretch axes leave the diagonal left stretch tensor fixed, so material frame indifference forces the stress's off-diagonal entries to vanish in those axes. Rotations within repeated-stretch eigenspaces also force isotropic stress there. Consequently stress and the left Cauchy-Green deformation tensor are coaxial symmetric tensors.