Transport in inhomogeneous quantum critical fluids and in the Dirac fluid in graphene

By Andrew Lucas, J. Crossno, Kin Chung Fong, Philip Kim, S. Sachdev. 2015

165 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We develop a general hydrodynamic framework for computing direct current thermal and electric transport in a strongly interacting finite temperature quantum system near a Lorentz-invariant quantum critical point. Our framework is non-perturbative in the strength of long wavelength fluctuations in the background charge density of the electronic fluid, and requires the rate of electron-electron scattering to be faster than the rate of electron-impurity scattering. We use this formalism to compute transport coefficients in the Dirac fluid in clean samples of graphene near the charge neutrality point, and find results insensitive to long range Coulomb interactions. Numerical results are compared to recent experimental data on thermal and electrical conductivity in the Dirac fluid in graphene and substantially improved quantitative agreement over existing hydrodynamic theories is found. We comment on the interplay between the Dirac fluid and acoustic and optical phonons, and qualitatively explain experimentally observed effects. Our work paves the way for quantitative contact between experimentally realized condensed matter systems and the wide body of high energy inspired theories on transport in interacting many-body quantum systems.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e8956f4e87653e5f68ee8c0eaf4e4bfc2265a1b

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Observation of the Dirac fluid and the breakdown of the Wiedemann-Franz law in graphene (2015, methodology): “[5, 6], electrical conductivity increases slower than expected away from the CNP, a result consistent with hydrodynamic transport in a viscous fluid with charge puddles [41].”
Holographic Quantum Matter (2016, methodology): “Further tests of the separate T and ρ dependencies of κ and σ agreed better with a theory in which the disorder was assumed to have long-wavelength “puddle” character, and the whole fluid was described by inhomogeneous hydrodynamics [517].”
Relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (2017, background): “Examples include transport near relativistic quantum critical points [12], in graphene [13, 14] and in Weyl semi-metals [15].”