English

Shear viscosity and imperfect fluidity in bosonic and fermionic superfluids

Quantum Gases 2015-06-22 v2

Abstract

In this paper we address the ratio of the shear viscosity to entropy density η/s\eta/s in bosonic and fermionic superfluids. A small η/s\eta/s is associated with nearly perfect fluidity, and more general measures of the fluidity perfection/imperfection are of wide interest to a number of communities. We use a Kubo approach to concretely address this ratio via low temperature transport associated with the quasi-particles. Our analysis for bosonic superfluids utilizes the framework of the one-loop Bogoliubov approximation, whereas for fermionic superfluids we apply BCS theory and its BCS-BEC extension. Interestingly, we find that the transport properties of strict BCS and Bogoliubov superfluids have very similar structures, albeit with different quasi-particle dispersion relations. While there is a dramatic contrast between the power law and exponential temperature dependence for η\eta alone, the ratio η/s\eta/s for both systems is more similar. Specifically we find the same linear dependence (on the ratio of temperature TT to inverse lifetime γ(T)\gamma(T)) with η/sT/γ(T)\eta/s \propto T/\gamma(T), corresponding to imperfect fluidity. By contrast, near the unitary limit of BCS-BEC superfluids a very different behavior results, which is more consistent with near-perfect fluidity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1407.7572,
  title  = {Shear viscosity and imperfect fluidity in bosonic and fermionic superfluids},
  author = {Rufus Boyack and Hao Guo and K. Levin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.7572},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

v2: 8 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:15:16.354Z