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Updated: Sep 23, 2026

An Analog Macroscopic Technique for Studying Molecular Hydrodynamic Processes in Dense Gases and Liquids
Published on: December 4, 2017
Hydrodynamic description of collisional odd fluids from kinetic theory
Ege Eren1, Michel Fruchart2, Vincenzo Vitelli1,3
1University of Chicago, James Franck Institute, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA.
Abstract:
When the time-reversal and parity symmetries in a fluid are broken, transverse transport coefficients can arise in response to perturbations, an example being odd viscosity. We refer to these systems as odd fluids. While much progress has been made in the continuum theory of odd-viscous fluids, and noncollisional models for odd viscous fluids have been proposed, a classical microscopic description in which the transverse responses originate from collisions is lacking. In this paper, we show that a dilute granular gas of rough and inelastic particles driven by a constant torque is a minimal microscopic model of an odd fluid. By applying the methods of Boltzmann kinetic theory, we obtain a hydrodynamic description of the microscopic model. Then, using the method of adiabatic elimination, we numerically compute all the response coefficients of the model, explicitly showing that the model has many odd response terms. Our theory predicts that certain odd response coefficients can change sign even when the direction of the external torque is fixed. While we choose a particular case, the procedure we present can be applied to any collisional model. We also present a semiquantitative method to determine the hydrodynamic variables of the theory by observing the eigenvalue spectrum of the linear collision operator. In the end, we repeat the analysis to study a system with rotational drag. We observe that including rotational drag can affect the choice of hydrodynamic variables and numerical values of response coefficients.
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