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Transport in inhomogeneous quantum critical fluids and in the Dirac fluid in graphene

Andrew Lucas, Jesse Crossno, Kin Chung Fong, Philip Kim, and Subir Sachdev
Phys. Rev. B 93, 075426 – Published 16 February 2016

Abstract

We develop a general hydrodynamic framework for computing direct current, thermal, and electric transport in a strongly interacting finite-temperature quantum system near a Lorentz-invariant quantum critical point. Our framework is nonperturbative in the strength of long-wavelength fluctuations in the background-charge density of the electronic fluid and requires the rate of electron-electron scattering to be faster than the rate of electron-impurity scattering. We use this formalism to compute transport coefficients in the Dirac fluid in clean samples of graphene near the charge neutrality point, and find results insensitive to long-range Coulomb interactions. Numerical results are compared to recent experimental data on thermal and electrical conductivity in the Dirac fluid in graphene and a substantially improved quantitative agreement over existing hydrodynamic theories is found. We comment on the interplay between the Dirac fluid and acoustic and optical phonons, and qualitatively explain the experimentally observed effects. Our work paves the way for quantitative contact between experimentally realized condensed matter systems and the wide body of high-energy inspired theories on transport in interacting many-body quantum systems.

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  • Received 12 October 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.93.075426

©2016 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

  1. Research Areas
  1. Physical Systems
Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Andrew Lucas1,*, Jesse Crossno1,2, Kin Chung Fong3, Philip Kim1,2, and Subir Sachdev1,4

  • 1Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
  • 2John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
  • 3Quantum Information Processing Group, Raytheon BBN Technologies, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
  • 4Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 2Y5, Canada

  • *lucas@fas.harvard.edu

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Issue

Vol. 93, Iss. 7 — 15 February 2016

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