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Published on: March 30, 2017
Hydrodynamic Relaxation in a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas
Xin Wang1, Xiang Li1, Ilya Arakelyan1
1Department of Physics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695, USA.
Abstract:
We measure the free decay of a spatially periodic density profile in a normal fluid strongly interacting Fermi gas, which is confined in a box potential. This spatial profile is initially created in thermal equilibrium by a perturbing potential. After the perturbation is abruptly extinguished, the dominant spatial Fourier component exhibits an exponentially decaying (thermally diffusive) mode and a decaying oscillatory (first sound) mode, enabling independent measurement of the thermal conductivity and the shear viscosity directly from the time-dependent evolution.
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