Shear viscosity and imperfect fluidity in bosonic and fermionic superfluids

Abstract

In this paper we address the ratio of the shear viscosity to entropy density $\eta/s$ in bosonic and fermionic superfluids. A small $\eta/s$ is associated with nearly perfect fluidity, and more general measures of the fluidity perfection/imperfection are of wide interest to a number of communities. We use a Kubo approach to concretely address this ratio via low temperature transport associated with the quasi-particles. Our analysis for bosonic superfluids utilizes the framework of the one-loop Bogoliubov approximation, whereas for fermionic superfluids we apply BCS theory and its BCS-BEC extension. Interestingly, we find that the transport properties of strict BCS and Bogoliubov superfluids have very similar structures, albeit with different quasi-particle dispersion relations. While there is a dramatic contrast between the power law and exponential temperature dependence for $\eta$ alone, the ratio $\eta/s$ for both systems is more similar. Specifically we find the same linear dependence (on the ratio of temperature $T$ to inverse lifetime $\gamma(T)$) with $\eta/s \propto T/\gamma(T)$, corresponding to imperfect fluidity. By contrast, near the unitary limit of BCS-BEC superfluids a very different behavior results, which is more consistent with near-perfect fluidity.