arXiv · 0707.1520
Shear viscosity of a superfluid Fermi gas in the unitarity limit
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 xi^5/T^5, where the universal parameter 'xi' relates the chemical potential and the Fermi energy, mu=xi E_F. Combined with the high temperature expansions of the viscosity our results suggest that the viscosity has a minimum near the critical temperature T_c. A naive extrapolation indicates that the minimum value of the ratio of viscosity over entropy density is within a factor of ~ 5 of the proposed lower bound hbar/(4πk_B).
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Gautam Rupak, Thomas Schaefer. 2007-07-11. Shear viscosity of a superfluid Fermi gas in the unitarity limit. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreva.76.053607
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