Electron hydrodynamics with a polygonal Fermi surface
Abstract
Recent experiments have observed hints of hydrodynamic electron flow in a number of materials, not all of which have an isotropic Fermi surface. We revisit these experiments in , a quasi-two-dimensional material whose Fermi surface is a rounded hexagon, and observe that the data appears quantitatively consistent with a non-hydrodynamic interpretation. Nevertheless, motivated by such experiments, we develop a simple model for the low temperature kinetics and hydrodynamics of a two-dimensional Fermi liquid with a polygonal Fermi surface. A geometric effect leads to a finite number of additional long-lived quasihydrodynamic "imbalance" modes and corresponding qualitative changes in transport at the ballistic-to-hydrodynamic crossover. In the hydrodynamic limit, we find incoherent diffusion and a new dissipative component of the viscosity tensor arising from the explicit breaking of rotational invariance by the Fermi surface. Finally, we compute the conductance of narrow channels across the ballistic-to-hydrodynamic crossover and demonstrate a modification of the Gurzhi effect that allows for non-monotonic temperature and width dependence in the channel conductance.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1903.05652,
title = {Electron hydrodynamics with a polygonal Fermi surface},
author = {Caleb Q. Cook and Andrew Lucas},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.05652},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
27 + 11 pages (main text + appendices/references); 8+1 figures; 1+2 tables. v2: published version