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arXiv:2409.10099 · Annalen der Physik

Dispersion of First Sound in a Weakly Interacting Ultracold Fermi Liquid

Thomas Repplinger, Songtao Huang, Yunpeng Ji, Nir Navon, Hadrien Kurkjian

Published Aug 28, 2025• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract At low temperature, a normal gas of unpaired spin‐1/2 fermions is one of the cleanest realizations of a Fermi liquid. It is described by Landau's theory, where no phenomenological parameters are needed as the quasiparticle interaction function can be computed perturbatively in powers of the scattering length , the sole parameter of the short‐range interparticle interactions. Obtaining an accurate solution of the transport equation nevertheless requires a careful treatment of the collision kernel, as the uncontrolled error made by the relaxation time approximations increases when the temperature drops below the Fermi temperature. Here, sound waves in the hydrodynamic regime are studied up to second order in the Chapman‐Enskog's expansion. It is found that the frequency of the sound wave is shifted above its linear departure as where and are the speed and wavenumber of the sound wave and the typical collision time scales as . Besides the shear viscosity, the coefficient is described by a single second‐order collision time, which is computed exactly from an analytical solution of the transport equation, resulting in a positive dispersion . The results suggest that ultracold atomic Fermi gases are an ideal experimental system for quantitative tests of second‐order hydrodynamics.

DOI
10.1002/andp.202500181

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Abstract At low temperature, a normal gas of unpaired spin‐1/2 fermions is one of the cleanest realizations of a Fermi liquid. It is described by Landau's theory, where no phenomenological parameters are needed as the quasiparticle interaction function can be computed perturbatively in powers of the scattering length , the sole parameter of the short‐range interparticle interactions. Obtaining an accurate solution of the transport equation nevertheless requires a careful treatment of the collision kernel, as the uncontrolled error made by the relaxation time approximations increases when the temperature drops below the Fermi temperature. Here, sound waves in the hydrodynamic regime are studied up to second order in the Chapman‐Enskog's expansion. It is found that the frequency of the sound wave is shifted above its linear departure as where and are the speed and wavenumber of the sound wave and the typical collision time scales as . Besides the shear viscosity, the coefficient is described by a single second‐order collision time, which is computed exactly from an analytical solution of the transport equation, resulting in a positive dispersion . The results suggest that ultracold atomic Fermi gases are an ideal experimental system for quantitative tests of second‐order hydrodynamics.
We compute the shear viscosity, thermal conductivity, and spin diffusivity of a Fermi gas with short-range interactions in the Fermi liquid regime of the normal phase, that is, at temperatures T much lower than the Fermi temperature T_{F} and larger than the superfluid critical temperature T_{c}. In line with recent advances in the precision of cold atom experiments, we provide exact results up to the second order in the interaction strength. We extend the Landau-Salpeter equation to compute the collision amplitude beyond the forward-scattering limit, covering all collisions on the Fermi surface. We treat the collision kernel exactly, leading to significant corrections beyond relaxation-time or variational approximations. The transport coefficients, as functions of the s wave scattering length a and Fermi wave number k_{F}, follow (1+γk_{F}a)/a^{2} up to corrections of order O(a^{0}), with a positive coefficient γ for the viscosity and negative one for the thermal conductivity and spin diffusivity.
Landau’s Fermi-liquid (FL) theory has been successful at the phenomenological description of the normal phase of many different Fermi systems. Using a dilute atomic Fermi fluid with tunable interactions, we investigate the microscopic basis of Landau’s theory with a system describable from first principles. We study transport properties of an interacting Fermi gas by measuring its density response to a periodic external perturbation. In an ideal Fermi gas, we measure for the first time the celebrated Lindhard function. As the system is brought from the collisionless to the hydrodynamic regime, we observe the emergence of sound and find that the experimental observations are quantitatively understood with a first-principle transport equation for the FL. When the system is more strongly interacting, we find deviations from such predictions. Finally, we measure the momentum-space shape of the quasiparticle excitations and see how it evolves from the collisionless to the collisional regime. Our study establishes this system as a clean platform for studying Landau’s theory of the FL and paves the way for extending the theory to more exotic conditions, such as nonlinear dynamics and FLs with strong correlations in versatile settings.
This article follows up on arxiv:2511.15938, in which we developed an Hamiltonian renormalization scheme to construct a quantized theory of Fermi liquids. Here, we apply this formalism to a low-temperature atomic Fermi gas where the short-range interactions are fully parametrized by the s-wave scattering length aaa. We benchmark our renormalized theory by recovering known perturbative results on the static properties of the Fermi gas, such as the Lee-Huang-Yang expansion of the equation of state, the Galitskii expansion of the momentum distribution, and the Gor'kov-Melik Barkhudarov preexponential correction to the critical temperature. We then turn to the transport dynamics and demonstrate the presence of a preexponential correction to the speed of zero sound when including corrections of second order in aaa. Finally, we develop an efficient numerical method to solve the transport equation exactly, and we apply it to study the crossover from the collisionless to the hydrodynamic regime in the density and polarisation response functions.
We provide a description of the dynamic structure factor of a homogeneous unitary Fermi gas at low momentum and low frequency, based on the dissipative two-fluid hydrodynamic theory. The viscous relaxation time is estimated and is used to determine the regime where the hydrodynamic theory is applicable and to understand the nature of sound waves in the density response near the superfluid phase transition. By collecting the best knowledge on the shear viscosity and thermal conductivity known so far, we calculate the various diffusion coefficients and obtain the damping width of the (first and second) sounds. We find that the damping width of the first sound is greatly enhanced across the superfluid transition and very close to the transition the second sound might be resolved in the density response for the transferred momentum up to half of Fermi momentum. Our work is motivated by the recent measurement of the local dynamic structure factor at low momentum at Swinburne University of Technology and the ongoing experiment on sound attenuation of a homogeneous unitary Fermi gas at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We discuss how the measurement of the velocity and damping width of the sound modes in low-momentum dynamic structure factor may lead to an improved determination of the universal superfluid density, shear viscosity, and thermal conductivity of a unitary Fermi gas.
We study the Fermi liquid properties of a single component Fermi gas with p-wave interactions. In the weak repulsive limit, we obtain exact perturbative expansions for the ground state energy, the chemical potential, and the effective mass of the Landau quasiparticle up to second order in scattering volume a. We also calculated the corresponding Landau functions and Landau parameters and show that they satisfy the general Fermi liquid identities. Using the Landau transport equation, we show that undamped zero sound only appears in the second order in scattering volume, in contrast to the s-wave case.
We provide an overview of the recent theoretical and experimental advances in the study of second sound in ultracold atomic gases. Starting from the Landau two fluid hydrodynamic equations we develop the theory of first and second sound in various configurations characterized by different geometries and quantum statistics. These include the weakly interacting 3D Bose gas, the strongly interacting Fermi gas at unitarity in the presence of highly elongated traps and the dilute 2D Bose gas, characterized by the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition. An explicit comparison with the propagation of second sound in liquid Helium is carried out to elucidate the main analogies and differences. We also make an explicit comparison with the available experimental data and point out the crucial role played by the superfluid density in determining the temperature dependence of the second sound speed.