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arXiv:1103.4869 · Physical Review A

Elliptic flow of the dilute Fermi gas: From kinetics to hydrodynamics

Kevin Dusling, Thomas Schäfer

Published Jul 28, 2011• 10 citations
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Abstract

We use the Boltzmann equation in the relaxation-time approximation to study the expansion of a dilute Fermi gas at unitarity. We focus, in particular, on the approach to the hydrodynamic limit. Our main findings are the following: (i) In the regime that has been studied experimentally hydrodynamic effects beyond the Navier-Stokes approximation are small. (ii) Mean-field corrections to the Boltzmann equation are not important. (iii) Experimental data imply that freezeout occurs very late, which means that the relaxation time remains smaller than the expansion time during the entire evolution of the system. (iv) The experimental results also imply that the bulk viscosity is significantly smaller than the shear viscosity of the system.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.84.013622

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We use the Boltzmann equation in the relaxation-time approximation to study the expansion of a dilute Fermi gas at unitarity. We focus, in particular, on the approach to the hydrodynamic limit. Our main findings are the following: (i) In the regime that has been studied experimentally hydrodynamic effects beyond the Navier-Stokes approximation are small. (ii) Mean-field corrections to the Boltzmann equation are not important. (iii) Experimental data imply that freezeout occurs very late, which means that the relaxation time remains smaller than the expansion time during the entire evolution of the system. (iv) The experimental results also imply that the bulk viscosity is significantly smaller than the shear viscosity of the system.
We investigate the expansion dynamics of a dilute Fermi gas at unitarity in the context of dissipative fluid dynamics. Our aim is to quantify the effects of shear viscosity on the time evolution of the system. We compare exact numerical solutions of the equations of viscous hydrodynamics to various approximations that have been proposed in the literature. Our main findings are (i) shear viscosity leads to characteristic features in the expansion dynamics; (ii) a quantitative description of these effects has to include reheating; (iii) dissipative effects are not sensitive to the equation of state P(n,T)P(n,T)P(n,T) as long as the universal relation P=23EP=\frac{2}{3}\mathcal{E}P=32​E is satisfied; (iv) the expansion dynamics mainly constrains the cloud average of the shear viscosity.
We compute second-order transport coefficients of the dilute Fermi gas at unitarity. The calculation is based on kinetic theory and the Boltzmann equation at second order in the Knudsen expansion. The second-order transport coefficients describe the shear stress relaxation time, nonlinear terms in the strain-stress relation, and nonlinear couplings between vorticity and strain. An exact calculation in the dilute limit gives ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{R}=\ensuremath{\eta}/P$, where ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{R}$ is the shear stress relaxation time, $\ensuremath{\eta}$ is the shear viscosity, and PPP is pressure. This relation is identical to the result obtained using the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook approximation to the collision term, but other transport coefficients are sensitive to the exact collision integral.
We consider the time evolution of a dilute atomic Fermi gas after release from a trapping potential. A common difficulty with using fluid dynamics to study the expansion of the gas is that the theory is not applicable in the dilute corona, and that a naive treatment of the entire cloud using fluid dynamics leads to unphysical results. We propose to remedy this problem by including certain nonhydrodynamic degrees of freedom, in particular anisotropic components of the pressure tensor, in the theoretical description. We show that, using this method, it is possible to describe the crossover from fluid dynamics to ballistic expansion locally. We illustrate the use of anisotropic fluid dynamics by studying the expansion of the dilute Fermi gas at unitarity using different functional forms of the shear viscosity, including a shear viscosity that is solely a function of temperature, $\ensuremath{\eta}\ensuremath{\sim}{(mT)}^{3/2}$, as predicted by kinetic theory in the dilute limit.
Abstract. In this contribution we summarize recent progress in understanding the shear viscosity of strongly correlated dilute Fermi gases. We discuss predictions from kinetic theory, and show how these predictions can be tested using recent experimental data on elliptic flow. We find agreement between theory and experiments in the high temperature regime T TF, where TF is the the temperature where quantum degeneracy effects become important. In the low temperature regime, T ∼ TF, the strongest constraints on the shear viscosity come from experimental studies of the damping of collective modes. These experiments indicate that η/s ∼< 0.5h̄/kB, where η is the shear viscosity and s is the entropy density.