With the right Cauchy-Green deformation tensor , the Green-Lagrange strain tensor measures the change in the material metric. Since , its work-conjugate stress and strain partner is the second Piola-Kirchhoff stress tensor . The formula follows by cycling factors in , not by identifying nominal and symmetric material stress.
Let be an invertible, orientation-preserving deformation gradient, with . To prove Nanson's formula, take two reference surface tangent vectors . Their current images are , and their oriented area vectors are proportional to and . For every vector , the scalar triple product gives
Thus , and
This proof also identifies the area transformation as the cofactor of , rather than a transformation by itself.
Use the paper's material-index-first nominal stress tensor . Equality of force on the same material surface in its two configurations gives . Substitute the area transformation to obtain
Here is the Kirchhoff stress tensor. With symmetric Cauchy stress tensor, the matrix forms are and . This is the transpose of the first Piola-Kirchhoff stress tensor; keeping the index convention prevents a spurious transpose later.
For the velocity gradient , let be the rate-of-strain tensor. Then the reference-volume mechanical power is
The last step uses stress symmetry, as supplied by angular-momentum balance in an ordinary continuum without couple stresses: a symmetric tensor has zero contraction with the skew part of .
By work-conjugate stress and strain, a pair must satisfy for every deformation rate, with both sides measured per reference volume. For the Green-Lagrange strain tensor, set and calculate
Cyclically rearranging the contraction shows . Hence the symmetric conjugate is
the second Piola-Kirchhoff stress tensor.
The inverse right Cauchy-Green strain is , because . Differentiating gives
Consequently , and
The two stress measures have a geometric interpretation in the convected coordinate net. Its basis vectors are and its reciprocal basis is . The entries of are the contravariant components in , whereas are the covariant components, equivalently . They describe the same spatial Kirchhoff stress tensor in a deforming, generally nonorthonormal coordinate net.
The Green-Lagrange strain tensor has eigenvalues . Its Frobenius norm and trace are invariant under the orthogonal principal-axis change, so
For the homogeneous dilation , put . Then . Differentiating the energy through gives the second Piola-Kirchhoff stress tensor , and multiplication by gives the first Piola-Kirchhoff stress tensor. Thus
The normals of the reference and deformed spheres point in the same radial direction. As , the reference traction magnitude tends to zero, while the current traction magnitude tends to infinity, provided , as for physically stable Lamé parameters. The negative signs of the stress coefficients for indicate compression.
There is no contradiction: the current area is times the reference area, so the same force divided by the vanishing current area has the larger stress. Indeed . The limiting map at is not itself an admissible deformation in continuum mechanics; the statement concerns the approach through positive . A degenerate choice would not have the asserted growth without bound.
This objective isotropic constitutive model uses the Green-Lagrange strain tensor . It reproduces linear elasticity at small strain. Under simple shear , its longitudinal nominal stress is . Nonuniform finite shear therefore generates longitudinal acceleration, even though the corresponding infinitesimal transverse mode is uncoupled.