Shear Viscosity of Uniform Fermi Gases with Population Imbalance

Abstract

The shear viscosity has been an important topic in ultracold Fermi gases, and it has served as a diagnostic of various theories. Due to the complicated phase structures of population-imbalanced (polarized) Fermi gases with tunable attraction, past works on the shear viscosity mainly focused on unpolarized Fermi gases. Here we investigate the shear viscosity of homogeneous, population-imbalanced Fermi superfluid at finite temperatures by a pairing fluctuation theory for thermodynamical quantities and a gauge-invariant linear response theory for transport coefficients. The Cooper pairs lead to the anomalous shear viscosity analogous to the shear viscosity. We derive an exact relation connecting certain thermodynamic quantities and transport coefficients at the mean-field level for polarized unitary Fermi superfluids. An approximate relation beyond mean-field is proposed and only exhibits mild deviations from our numerical results. In the unitary and Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) regimes, the total shear viscosity increases with the polarization because the excess majority fermions cause gapless excitations acting like a normal fluid. Moreover, competition among the excess fermions, noncondensed pairs, and fermionic quasiparticles may lead to non-monotonic behavior of the ratio between the shear viscosity and relaxation time as the polarization increases.