Scaling flows and dissipation in the dilute Fermi gas at unitarity

Abstract

We describe recent attempts to extract the shear viscosity of the dilute Fermi gas at unitarity from experiments involving scaling flows. A scaling flow is a solution of the hydrodynamic equations that preserves the shape of the density distribution. The scaling flows that have been explored in the laboratory kflccare the transverse expansion from a deformed trap ("elliptic flow"), the expansion from a rotating trap, and collective oscillations. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of the different experiments, and point to improvements of the theoretical analysis that are needed in order to achieve definitive results. A conservative bound based on the current data is that the minimum of the shear viscosity to entropy density ration is η/s ≤ 0.5//kB. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.