English

Anomalous minimum in the shear viscosity of a Fermi gas

Quantum Gases 2014-08-06 v2

Abstract

We measure the static shear viscosity η\eta in a two-component Fermi gas near a broad collisional (Feshbach) resonance, as a function of interaction strength and energy. We find that η\eta has both a quadratic and a linear dependence on the interaction strength 1/(kFIa)1/({k_{FI}a}), where aa is the s-wave scattering length and kFIk_{FI} is the Fermi wave vector for an ideal gas at the trap center. For energies above the superfluid transition, the minimum in η\eta as a function of interaction strength is significantly shifted toward the BEC side of resonance, to 1/(kFIa)0.251/(k_{FI}a)\simeq 0.25.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1311.2049,
  title  = {Anomalous minimum in the shear viscosity of a Fermi gas},
  author = {E. Elliott and J. A. Joseph and J. E. Thomas},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1311.2049},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

14 pages, 8 figures