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arXiv:1706.07247 · Scientific Reports

Shear Viscosity of Uniform Fermi Gases with Population Imbalance

Weimin Cai, Hao Guo, Yan He, Chih-Chun Chien

Published Feb 27, 2018• 3 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The shear viscosity has been an important topic in ultracold Fermi gases, and it has served as a diagnostic of various theories. Due to the complicated phase structures of population-imbalanced (polarized) Fermi gases with tunable attraction, past works on the shear viscosity mainly focused on unpolarized Fermi gases. Here we investigate the shear viscosity of homogeneous, population-imbalanced Fermi superfluid at finite temperatures by a pairing fluctuation theory for thermodynamical quantities and a gauge-invariant linear response theory for transport coefficients. The Cooper pairs lead to the anomalous shear viscosity analogous to the shear viscosity. We derive an exact relation connecting certain thermodynamic quantities and transport coefficients at the mean-field level for polarized unitary Fermi superfluids. An approximate relation beyond mean-field is proposed and only exhibits mild deviations from our numerical results. In the unitary and Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) regimes, the total shear viscosity increases with the polarization because the excess majority fermions cause gapless excitations acting like a normal fluid. Moreover, competition among the excess fermions, noncondensed pairs, and fermionic quasiparticles may lead to non-monotonic behavior of the ratio between the shear viscosity and relaxation time as the polarization increases.

DOI
10.1038/s41598-018-22273-1

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The shear viscosity has been an important topic in ultracold Fermi gases, and it has served as a diagnostic of various theories. Due to the complicated phase structures of population-imbalanced (polarized) Fermi gases with tunable attraction, past works on the shear viscosity mainly focused on unpolarized Fermi gases. Here we investigate the shear viscosity of homogeneous, population-imbalanced Fermi superfluid at finite temperatures by a pairing fluctuation theory for thermodynamical quantities and a gauge-invariant linear response theory for transport coefficients. The Cooper pairs lead to the anomalous shear viscosity analogous to the shear viscosity. We derive an exact relation connecting certain thermodynamic quantities and transport coefficients at the mean-field level for polarized unitary Fermi superfluids. An approximate relation beyond mean-field is proposed and only exhibits mild deviations from our numerical results. In the unitary and Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) regimes, the total shear viscosity increases with the polarization because the excess majority fermions cause gapless excitations acting like a normal fluid. Moreover, competition among the excess fermions, noncondensed pairs, and fermionic quasiparticles may lead to non-monotonic behavior of the ratio between the shear viscosity and relaxation time as the polarization increases.
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We theoretically investigate the shear viscosity ηηη in the BCS-BEC crossover regime of an ultracold Fermi gas with a Feshbach resonance. Within the framework of the strong-coupling self-consistent TTT-matrix approximation, we examine how a strong pairing interaction associated with a Feshbach resonance affects this transport coefficient, in the normal state above the superfluid phase transition temperature TcT_{\rm c}Tc​. We show that, while ηηη diverges in both the weak-coupling BCS and strong-coupling BEC limits, it becomes small in the unitary regime. The minimum of ηηη is obtained, not at the unitarity, but slightly in the strong-coupling BEC side. This deviation is consistent with the recent experiment on a 6^66Li Fermi gas. In the weak-coupling BCS regime, we also find that ηηη exhibits anomalous temperature dependence near TcT_{\rm c}Tc​, which is deeply related to the pseudogap phenomenon originating form strong pairing fluctuations.
The bulk viscosity determines dissipation during hydrodynamic expansion. It vanishes in scale invariant fluids, while a nonzero value quantifies the deviation from scale invariance. For the dilute Fermi gas the bulk viscosity is given exactly by the correlation function of the contact density of local pairs. As a consequence, scale invariance is broken purely by pair fluctuations. These fluctuations give rise also to logarithmic terms in the bulk viscosity of the high-temperature nondegenerate gas. For the quantum degenerate regime I report numerical Luttinger-Ward results for the contact correlator and the dynamical bulk viscosity throughout the BEC-BCS crossover. The ratio of bulk to shear viscosity ζ/η is found to exceed the kinetic theory prediction in the quantum degenerate regime. Near the superfluid phase transition the bulk viscosity is enhanced by critical fluctuations and has observable effects on dissipative heating, expansion dynamics, and sound attenuation.
The viscosity of strongly interacting systems is a topic of great interest in diverse fields. We focus here on the bulk and shear viscosities of nonrelativistic quantum fluids, with particular emphasis on strongly interacting ultracold Fermi gases. We use Kubo formulas for the bulk and shear viscosity spectral functions, $\ensuremath{\zeta}(\ensuremath{\omega})$ and $\ensuremath{\eta}(\ensuremath{\omega})$, respectively, to derive exact, nonperturbative results. Our results include a microscopic connection between the shear viscosity $\ensuremath{\eta}$ and the normal-fluid density ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{n}$; sum rules for $\ensuremath{\zeta}(\ensuremath{\omega})$ and $\ensuremath{\eta}(\ensuremath{\omega})$ and their evolution through the BCS-BEC crossover (where BEC denotes Bose-Einstein condensate); and universal high-frequency tails for $\ensuremath{\eta}(\ensuremath{\omega})$ and the dynamic structure factor $S(\mathbf{q},\ensuremath{\omega})$. We use our sum rules to show that, at unitarity, $\ensuremath{\zeta}(\ensuremath{\omega})$ is identically zero and thus relate $\ensuremath{\eta}(\ensuremath{\omega})$ to density-density correlations. We predict that frequency-dependent shear viscosity $\ensuremath{\eta}(\ensuremath{\omega})$ of the unitary Fermi gas can be experimentally measured using Bragg spectroscopy.
Abstract We report on the measurement of shear viscosity in an ultracold Fermi gas with variable temperatures and tunable interactions. A quadrupole mode excitation in an isotropic harmonic trap is used to quantify the shear viscosity of the quantum gas within the hydrodynamic regime. The shear viscosity of the system as a function of temperature has been investigated, and the results closely align with calculations in the high-temperature limit utilizing a new definition of the cutoff radius. Through an adiabatic sweep across the Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) to Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) crossover, we find that the minimum value of the shear viscosity, as a function of interaction strength, is significantly shifted toward the BEC side. Furthermore, the behavior of the shear viscosity is asymmetric on both sides of the location of the minimum.