Thermal conductivity and sound attenuation in dilute atomic Fermi gases

We compute the thermal conductivity and sound attenuation length of a dilute atomic Fermi gas in the framework of kinetic theory. Above the critical temperature for superfluidity, T{sub c}, the quasiparticles are fermions, whereas below T{sub c}, the dominant excitations are phonons. We calculate the thermal conductivity in both cases. We find that at unitarity the thermal conductivity {kappa} in the normal phase scales as {kappa}{proportional_to}T{sup 3/2}. In the superfluid phase we find {kappa}{proportional_to}T{sup 2}. At high temperature the Prandtl number, the ratio of the momentum and thermal diffusion constants, is 2/3. The ratio increases as the temperature is lowered. As a consequence we expect sound attenuation in the normal phase just above T{sub c} to be dominated by shear viscosity. We comment on the possibility of extracting the shear viscosity of the dilute Fermi gas at unitarity using measurements of the sound absorption length.

• Publication year

  2010

• Venue

  Physical Review A

• Publication date

  2010-03-12

• Fields of study

  Physics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevA.82.033619arXiv 1003.2601
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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