Viscosity spectral functions of the dilute Fermi gas in kinetic theory

Abstract

We compute the viscosity spectral function of the dilute Fermi gas for different values of the s-wave scattering length a, including the unitarity limit → ∞. We perform the calculation in kinetic theory by studying the response to a non-trivial background metric. We find the expected structure consisting of a diffusive peak in the transverse shear channel and a sound peak in the longitudinal channel. At zero momentum the width of the diffusive peak is !0 ω0≃(2ε)/(3β) where ε is the energy density and η is the shear viscosity. At finite momentum the spectral function approaches the collisionless limit and the width is of the order of ω00 ∼k(T/m)1/2.© IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.