Viscosity and scale invariance in the unitary Fermi gas

Abstract

We compute the shear viscosity of the unitary Fermi gas above the superfluid transition temperature, using a diagrammatic technique that starts from the exact Kubo formula. The formalism obeys a Ward identity associated with scale invariance which guarantees that the bulk viscosity vanishes identically. For the shear viscosity, vertex corrections and the associated Aslamazov-Larkin contributions are shown to be crucial to reproduce the full Boltzmann equation result in the high-temperature, low fugacity limit. The frequency dependent shear viscosity �(!) exhibits a Drude-like transport peak and a power-law tail at large frequencies which is proportional to the Tan contact. The weight in the transport peak is given by the equilibrium pressure, in agreement with a sum rule due to Taylor and Randeria. Near the superfluid transition the peak width is of the order of 0:5TF, thus invalidating a quasiparticle description. The ratio �=s between the static shear viscosity and the entropy density exhibits a minimum near the superfluid transition temperature whose value is larger than the string theory bound ~=(4�kB) by a factor of about seven.