High-temperature expansion of the viscosity in interacting quantum gases

We compute the frequency-dependent shear and bulk viscosity spectral functions of an interacting Fermi gas in a quantum virial expansion up to second quadratic order in the fugacity parameter $z=e^{βμ}$, which is small at high temperatures. Calculations are carried out using a diagrammatic finite-temperature field-theoretic framework, in which the analytic continuation from Matsubara to real frequencies is carried out in closed analytic form. Besides a possible zero-frequency Drude peak, our results for the spectral functions show a broad continuous spectrum at all frequencies with an additional bound-state contribution for frequencies larger than the dimer-breaking energy. Our results are consistent with various sum rules and universal high-frequency tails. In the low-frequency limit, the shear viscosity spectral function is recast as a collision integral, which reproduces known results for the static shear viscosity from kinetic theory. Our findings for the static bulk viscosity of a Fermi gas near unitarity, however, show a nonanalytic dependence on the scattering length, at variance with kinetic theory.

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