Shear viscosity of a superfluid Fermi gas in the unitarity limit

Gautam Rupak and Thomas Schäfer
Phys. Rev. A 76, 053607 – Published 13 November 2007

Abstract

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 T limit the shear viscosity scales as ξ5T5, where the universal parameter ξ relates the chemical potential and the Fermi energy, μ=ξεF. Combined with the high temperature expansions of the viscosity our results suggest that the viscosity has a minimum near the critical temperature Tc. A naïve extrapolation indicates that the minimum value of the ratio of viscosity over entropy density is within a factor of 5 of the proposed bound ηs(4πkB).

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  • Received 23 July 2007

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.76.053607

©2007 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Gautam Rupak* and Thomas Schäfer

  • Department of Physics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695, USA

  • *grupak@u.washington.edu
  • tmschaef@unity.ncsu.edu

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Issue

Vol. 76, Iss. 5 — November 2007

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