Nearly perfect fluidity in cold atomic gases

Thomas Schäfer (North Carolina State U.)

Like the quark gluon plasma created in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions, a dilute ultracold Fermi gas near a Feshbach resonance is a strongly correlated quantum fluid that exhibits nearly perfect fluidity.  This means the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density approaches a lower bound that is believed to follow from the uncertainty relation, and that has been made more precise using calculations based on string theory.  In this talk we will focus on three issues: i) efforts to extract transport coefficients from experiment, ii) constraints on the equations of fluid dynamics from conformal invariance, iii) studies of the spectral function of the shear tensor in kinetic theory.

(Seminarraum II)

[Note unusual time!]