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arXiv:cond-mat/0504734 · Physical Review A

Viscosity and thermal relaxation for a resonantly interacting Fermi gas

Georg M. Bruun, H. Smith

Published Oct 13, 2005• 87 citations
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Abstract

The viscous and thermal relaxation rates of an interacting fermion gas are calculated as functions of temperature and scattering length, using a many-body scattering matrix which incorporates medium effects due to Fermi blocking of intermediate states. These effects are demonstrated to be large close to the transition temperature ${T}_{c}$ to the superfluid state. For a homogeneous gas in the unitarity limit, the relaxation rates are increased by nearly an order of magnitude compared to their value obtained in the absence of medium effects due to the Cooper instability at ${T}_{c}$. For trapped gases the corresponding ratio is found to be about three due to the averaging over the inhomogeneous density distribution. The effect of superfluidity below ${T}_{c}$ is considered to leading order in the ratio between the energy gap and the transition temperature.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.72.043605

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The viscous and thermal relaxation rates of an interacting fermion gas are calculated as functions of temperature and scattering length, using a many-body scattering matrix which incorporates medium effects due to Fermi blocking of intermediate states. These effects are demonstrated to be large close to the transition temperature Tc{T}_{c}Tc​ to the superfluid state. For a homogeneous gas in the unitarity limit, the relaxation rates are increased by nearly an order of magnitude compared to their value obtained in the absence of medium effects due to the Cooper instability at Tc{T}_{c}Tc​. For trapped gases the corresponding ratio is found to be about three due to the averaging over the inhomogeneous density distribution. The effect of superfluidity below Tc{T}_{c}Tc​ is considered to leading order in the ratio between the energy gap and the transition temperature.
The viscous relaxation time of a trapped two-component gas of fermions in its normal phase is calculated as a function of temperature and scattering length, with the collision probability being determined by an energy-dependent sss-wave cross section. The result is used for calculating the temperature dependence of the frequency and damping of collective modes studied in recent experiments, starting from the kinetic equation for the fermion distribution function with mean-field effects included in the streaming terms.
We study the shear viscosity of a dilute Fermi gas as a function of the scattering length in the vicinity of the unitarity limit. The calculation is based on kinetic theory, which provides a systematic approach to transport properties in the limit in which the fugacity $z=n{\ensuremath{\lambda}}^{3}/2$ is small. Here, nnn is the density of the gas and $\ensuremath{\lambda}$ is the thermal wavelength of the fermions. At leading order in the fugacity expansion, the shear viscosity is independent of density, and the minimum shear viscosity is achieved at unitarity. At the next order, medium effects modify the scattering amplitude as well as the quasiparticle energy and velocity. We show that these effects shift the minimum of the shear viscosity to the Bose-Einstein condensation side of the resonance, in agreement with the result of recent experiments.
We compute the shear viscosity of a superfluid atomic Fermi gas in the unitarity limit. The unitarity limit is characterized by a divergent scattering length between the atoms, and it has been argued that this will result in a very small viscosity. We show that in the low temperature TTT limit the shear viscosity scales as ${\ensuremath{\xi}}^{5}∕{T}^{5}$, where the universal parameter $\ensuremath{\xi}$ relates the chemical potential and the Fermi energy, $\ensuremath{\mu}=\ensuremath{\xi}{\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{F}$. Combined with the high temperature expansions of the viscosity our results suggest that the viscosity has a minimum near the critical temperature Tc{T}_{c}Tc​. A na\"{\i}ve extrapolation indicates that the minimum value of the ratio of viscosity over entropy density is within a factor of $\ensuremath{\sim}5$ of the proposed bound $\ensuremath{\eta}∕s\ensuremath{\ge}\ensuremath{\hbar}∕(4\ensuremath{\pi}{k}_{B})$.
We investigate the transition and damping of low-energy collective modes in a trapped unitary Fermi gas by solving the Boltzmann-Vlasov kinetic equation in a scaled form, which is combined with both the T-matrix fluctuation theory in normal phase and the mean-field theory in order phase. In order to connect the microscopic and kinetic descriptions of many-body Feshbach scattering, we adopt a phenomenological two-fluid physical approach, and derive the coupling constants in the order phase. By solving the Boltzmann-Vlasov steady-state equation in a variational form, we calculate two viscous relaxation rates with the collision probabilities of fermion's scattering including fermions in the normal fluid and fermion pairs in the superfluid. Additionally, by considering the pairing and depairing of fermions, we get results of the frequency and damping of collective modes versus temperature and s-wave scattering length. Our theoretical results are in a remarkable agreement with the experimental data, particularly for the sharp transition between collisionless and hydrodynamic behaviour and strong damping between BCS and unitary limits near the phase transition. The sharp transition originates from the maximum of viscous relaxation rate caused by fermion-fermion pair collision at the phase transition point when the fermion depair, while the strong damping due to the fast varying of the frequency of collective modes from BCS limit to unitary limit.
Due to Pauli blocking of intermediate states, the scattering matrix (or TTT matrix) of two fermionic atoms in a Fermi gas becomes different from that of two atoms in free space. This effect becomes particularly important near a Feshbach resonance, where the interaction in free space is very strong but becomes effectively suppressed in the medium. We calculate the in-medium TTT matrix in ladder approximation and study its effects on the properties of collective modes of a trapped gas in the normal-fluid phase. We introduce the in-medium interaction on both sides of the Boltzmann equation, namely, in the calculation of the mean field and in the calculation of the collision rate. This allows us to explain the observed upward shift of the frequency of the quadrupole mode in the collisionless regime. By including the mean field, we also improve considerably the agreement with the measured temperature dependence of frequency and damping rate of the scissors mode, whereas the use of the in-medium cross section deteriorates the description, in agreement with previous work.
We compute the coefficients of bulk viscosity for a nonrelativistic superfluid corresponding to a fermionic system close to the unitarity limit. We consider the low temperature regime assuming that the transport properties of the system are dominated by phonons. To compute the coefficients of bulk viscosity we use kinetic theory in the relaxation time approximation and the low energy effective field theory of the corresponding system. We show that the three independent bulk viscosity coefficients, ${\ensuremath{\zeta}}_{1},{\ensuremath{\zeta}}_{2},{\ensuremath{\zeta}}_{3}$, associated with irreversible flows vanish for phonons with a linear dispersion law. Considering a phonon dispersion law with a cubic term in momentum we find that in the conformal limit ${\ensuremath{\zeta}}_{1}={\ensuremath{\zeta}}_{2}=0$, while ${\ensuremath{\zeta}}_{3}$ is nonzero. Including a conformal breaking term that arises for a large but finite sss-wave scattering length, aaa, at the leading order in 1/a1/a1/a we obtain that ${\ensuremath{\zeta}}_{1}\ensuremath{\propto}1/a$ and ${\ensuremath{\zeta}}_{2}\ensuremath{\propto}1/{a}^{2}$.