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arXiv:2502.03423 · Physical Review Letters

Exact Perturbative Expansion of the Transport Coefficients of a Normal Low-Temperature Fermi Gas with Contact Interactions

Pierre-Louis Taillat, Hadrien Kurkjian

Published Sep 9, 2025• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1103/c6fd-x57s

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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.
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.
The scattering properties of spin-polarized Fermi gases are dominated by ppp-wave interactions. Besides their inherent angular dependence, these interactions differ from their sss-wave counterparts as they also require the presence of a finite effective range in order to understand the low-energy properties of the system. In this article we examine how the shear viscosity and thermal conductivity of a three-dimensional spin-polarized Fermi gas in the normal phase depend on the effective range and the scattering volume in both the weakly and the strongly interacting limits. We show that, although the shear viscosity and the thermal conductivity both explicitly depend on the effective range near resonance, the Prandtl number which parametrizes the ratio of momentum to thermal diffusivity does not have an explicit interaction dependence both at resonance and for weak interactions in the low-energy limit. In contrast to sss-wave systems, ppp-wave scattering exhibits an additional resonance at weak attraction from a quasi-bound state at positive energies, which leads to a pronounced dip in the shear viscosity at specific temperatures.
We present an exact solution of the quantum kinetic equation of a weakly interacting Fermi gas in the crossover from the degenerate Fermi-liquid regime to the classical Boltzmann gas. We construct families of orthogonal polynomials tailored to each angular momentum channel, enabling a fast and systematically improvable decomposition of the phase-space distribution. This approach yields accurate, non-variational predictions for the shear viscosity, thermal diffusivity, and spin diffusivity to leading order in the scattering length. We demonstrate that the commonly used relaxation-time approximation fails dramatically at low temperature--by up to 25%. Our method provides a numerically efficient framework for benchmarking transport in strongly correlated regimes and for simulating the kinetics of quantum gases beyond hydrodynamics.
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.
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We examine spin diffusion in a two-component homogeneous Fermi gas in the normal phase. Using a variational approach, analytical results are presented for the spin diffusion coefficient and the related spin relaxation time as a function of temperature and interaction strength. For low temperatures, strong correlation effects are included through the Landau parameters, which we extract from Monte Carlo results. We show that the spin diffusion coefficient has a minimum for a temperature somewhat below the Fermi temperature with a value that approaches the quantum limit ∼ℏ/ m in the unitarity regime, where m is the particle mass. Finally, we derive a value for the low-temperature shear viscosity in the normal phase from the Landau parameters.