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arXiv:1912.08227 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Drag viscosity of metals and its connection to Coulomb drag

Yunxiang Liao, Victor M. Galitski

Published May 4, 2020• 12 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in studies of hydrodynamic transport in electronic systems. We investigate the electron viscosity of metals and find a component that is closely related to Coulomb drag. By using linear-response theory, viscosity, which is a transport coefficient for momentum, can be extracted from the retarded correlation function of the momentum flux, i.e., the stress tensor. There exists a previously overlooked contribution to the shear viscosity from the interacting part of the stress tensor which accounts for the momentum flow induced by interactions. This contribution, which we dub drag viscosity, is caused by the frictional drag force due to long-range interactions. It is therefore linked to Coulomb drag which also originates from the interaction-induced drag force. Starting from the Kubo formula and using the Keldysh technique, we compute the drag viscosity of two- and three-dimensional metals along with the drag resistivity of double-layer two-dimensional electronic systems. Both the drag resistivity and drag viscosity exhibit a crossover from quadratic-in-$T$ behavior at low temperatures to a linear behavior at higher temperatures. Although the drag viscosity appears relatively small compared with the normal Drude component for the clean metals, it may dominate hydrodynamic transport in some systems, which are discussed in the conclusion.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.101.195106

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Recent years have seen a surge of interest in studies of hydrodynamic transport in electronic systems. We investigate the electron viscosity of metals and find a component that is closely related to Coulomb drag. By using linear-response theory, viscosity, which is a transport coefficient for momentum, can be extracted from the retarded correlation function of the momentum flux, i.e., the stress tensor. There exists a previously overlooked contribution to the shear viscosity from the interacting part of the stress tensor which accounts for the momentum flow induced by interactions. This contribution, which we dub drag viscosity, is caused by the frictional drag force due to long-range interactions. It is therefore linked to Coulomb drag which also originates from the interaction-induced drag force. Starting from the Kubo formula and using the Keldysh technique, we compute the drag viscosity of two- and three-dimensional metals along with the drag resistivity of double-layer two-dimensional electronic systems. Both the drag resistivity and drag viscosity exhibit a crossover from quadratic-in-TTT behavior at low temperatures to a linear behavior at higher temperatures. Although the drag viscosity appears relatively small compared with the normal Drude component for the clean metals, it may dominate hydrodynamic transport in some systems, which are discussed in the conclusion.
We develop a theory of Coulomb drag in ultraclean double layers with strongly correlated carriers. In the regime where the equilibration length of the electron liquid is shorter than the interlayer spacing the main contribution to the Coulomb drag arises from hydrodynamic density fluctuations. The latter consist of plasmons driven by fluctuating longitudinal stresses, and diffusive modes caused by temperature fluctuations and thermal expansion of the electron liquid. We express the drag resistivity in terms of the kinetic coefficients of the electron fluid. Our results are nonperturbative in interaction strength and do not assume Fermi-liquid behavior of the electron liquid.
In interaction-dominated two-dimensional electron gases at intermediate temperatures, electron transport is not diffusive as in the conventional Drude picture but instead hydrodynamic. The relevant transport coefficient in this regime is the shear viscosity. Here, we develop a numerically exact basis expansion to solve the Fermi liquid equation, and apply it to compute the shear viscosity of the electron gas with screened Coulomb interactions. Our calculations are valid at all temperatures and in particular describe the response beyond the asymptotic low-temperature limit, where perturbative approaches exist. We show that even in this low-temperature limit, there is a nonanalytic exchange contribution to the shear viscosity, highlighting the need for a full nonperturbative solution of the Fermi liquid equation. We hope that the techniques developed in this work will serve as a platform to determine the response of interacting Fermi liquids.
We study Coulomb drag between an active layer with a clean electron liquid and a passive layer with a pinned electron lattice in the regime of fast intralayer equilibration. Such a two-fluid system offers an experimentally realizable way to disentangle the fast rate of intralayer electron-electron interactions from the much slower rate of momentum transfer between both layers. We identify an intermediate temperature range above the Fermi energy of the electron fluid but below the Debye energy of the electronic crystal where the hydrodynamic drag resistivity is directly proportional to a fast electron-electron scattering rate. The results are compatible with the conjectured scenario for strong electron-electron interactions which poses that a linear temperature dependence of resistivity originates from a ``Planckian'' electron relaxation time ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{eq}\ensuremath{\sim}\ensuremath{\hbar}/{k}_{B}T$. We compare this to the better known semiclassical case, where the diffusion constant is found to be not proportional to the microscopic timescale.
We consider a hydrodynamic description of transport for generic two-dimensional electron systems that lack Galilean invariance and do not fall into the category of Fermi liquids. We study magnetoresistance and show that it is governed only by the electronic viscosity provided that the wavelength of the underlying disorder potential is large compared to the microscopic equilibration length. We also derive the Coulomb drag transresistance for double-layer non-Fermi-liquid systems in the hydrodynamic regime. As an example, we consider frictional drag between two quantum Hall states with half-filled lowest Landau levels, each described by a Fermi surface of composite fermions coupled to a U(1)U(1)U(1) gauge field. We contrast our results to prior calculations of drag of Chern-Simons composite particles and place our findings in the context of available experimental data.
The hydrodynamic regime of electron transport has been recently realized in conductors with ultralow densities of defects. Although relaxation processes in two-dimensional (2D) fluids have been studied in many theoretical works, the viscosity of the realistic Fermi gas of 2D electrons having a quadratic energy spectrum and interacting by Coulomb's law has not been reliably determined either in theory or in experiment. Here, we construct a theory of viscosity and thermal conductivity in such a system. We compare the calculated viscosity of the 2D electron Fermi gas and the previously known viscosity of a 2D Fermi liquid with available experimental data extracted from the hydrodynamic negative magnetoresistance of the best-quality GaAs quantum wells. Based on this comparison, we argue that measurements of the temperature dependence of the viscosity can allow us to trace the transition between an electron Fermi liquid and a Fermi gas.
Motivated by recent work on Hall viscosity, we derive from first principles the Kubo formulas for the stress-stress response function at zero wave vector that can be used to define the full complex frequency-dependent viscosity tensor, both with and without a uniform magnetic field. The formulas in the existing literature are frequently incomplete, incorrect, or lack a derivation; in particular, Hall viscosity is overlooked. Our approach begins from the response to a uniform external strain field, which is an active time-dependent coordinate transformation in ddd space dimensions. These transformations form the group GL(d,R)(d,\mathbb{R})(d,R) of invertible matrices, and the infinitesimal generators are called strain generators. These enable us to express the Kubo formula in different ways, related by Ward identities; some of these make contact with the adiabatic transport approach. The importance of retaining contact terms, analogous to the diamagnetic term in the familiar Kubo formula for conductivity, is emphasized. For Galilean-invariant systems, we derive a relation between the stress response tensor and the conductivity tensor that is valid at all frequencies and in both the presence and absence of a magnetic field. In the presence of a magnetic field and at low frequency, this yields a relation between the Hall viscosity, the q2{q}^{2}q2 part of the Hall conductivity, the inverse compressibility (suitably defined), and the diverging part of the shear viscosity (if any); this relation generalizes a result found recently by others. We show that the correct value of the Hall viscosity at zero frequency can be obtained (at least in the absence of low-frequency bulk and shear viscosity) by assuming that there is an orbital spin per particle that couples to a perturbing electromagnetic field as a magnetization per particle. We study several examples as checks on our formulation. We also present formulas for the stress response that directly generalize the Berry (adiabatic) curvature expressions for zero-frequency Hall conductivity or viscosity to the full tensors at all frequencies.