Odd-parity effect and scale-dependent viscosity in atomic quantum gases

Abstract

It has recently been predicted that two-dimensional electron gases possess an anomalous ``tomographic'' transport regime outside of the traditional collisionless and hydrodynamic limits, but an experimental confirmation has been elusive so far. This anomalous regime is marked by the appearance of an odd-even effect in the quasiparticle lifetimes where deformations of the Fermi surface with odd-parity become long-lived in comparison to even-parity ones. In this work, we establish neutral atomic quantum gases as an alternative platform to reveal this new transport regime and demonstrate an odd-even effect in the normal phase of two-component Fermi gases. By diagonalizing the Fermi liquid collision integral, we identify odd-parity modes with anomalously long lifetimes below temperatures $T\leq 0.1 T_F$, which is within the reach of current cold atom experiments. In a marked difference from condensed matter setups, we show that the odd-even effect in neutral gases is widely tunable with interactions along the BCS-BEC crossover and suppressed on the BEC side where the Fermi surface is destroyed. We propose the damping rate of quadrupole oscillations as an experimental signature of the long-lived odd-parity modes. The damping rate is set by the shear viscosity, which for finite trap confinement is dominated by odd-parity modes and thus anomalous enhanced compared to the hydrodynamic limit. Furthermore, a full computation of the shear viscosity within Fermi liquid theory shows that the magnitude of the odd-even effect depends on the particle number and is particularly pronounced in mesoscopic Fermi gases. Our findings suggest that the hydrodynamic behavior of neutral degenerate quantum gases is much richer than previously thought and should include additional long-lived modes.