Elastic Properties of Polycrystalline Solid Helium

Recent experiments have shown that the shear modulus of solid helium undergoes a large temperature variation in the range 20 to 200 mK, possibly due to changes in the pinning of dislocations. In this note we report on computer simulations of the elastic properties of polycrystalline solid helium. We calculate how the elastic coefficients of a sample made up of a large number of randomly oriented grains are affected by the changes in the shear modulus c44 of the individual grains.