Electron hydrodynamics with a polygonal Fermi surface

TL;DR

This paper models electron hydrodynamics in materials with polygonal Fermi surfaces, revealing unique quasihydrodynamic modes and transport phenomena, including a modified Gurzhi effect, especially relevant for materials like PdCoO2.

Contribution

It introduces a simple kinetic and hydrodynamic model for Fermi liquids with polygonal Fermi surfaces, highlighting new long-lived modes and transport behaviors.

Findings

Identification of additional long-lived quasihydrodynamic modes.

Prediction of a modified Gurzhi effect with non-monotonic conductance.

Demonstration of qualitative changes in transport at the ballistic-to-hydrodynamic crossover.

Abstract

Recent experiments have observed hints of hydrodynamic electron flow in a number of materials, not all of which have an isotropic Fermi surface. We revisit these experiments in $\mathrm{PdCoO}_2$, a quasi-two-dimensional material whose Fermi surface is a rounded hexagon, and observe that the data appears quantitatively consistent with a non-hydrodynamic interpretation. Nevertheless, motivated by such experiments, we develop a simple model for the low temperature kinetics and hydrodynamics of a two-dimensional Fermi liquid with a polygonal Fermi surface. A geometric effect leads to a finite number of additional long-lived quasihydrodynamic "imbalance" modes and corresponding qualitative changes in transport at the ballistic-to-hydrodynamic crossover. In the hydrodynamic limit, we find incoherent diffusion and a new dissipative component of the viscosity tensor arising from the explicit breaking of rotational invariance by the Fermi surface. Finally, we compute the conductance of narrow channels across the ballistic-to-hydrodynamic crossover and demonstrate a modification of the Gurzhi effect that allows for non-monotonic temperature and width dependence in the channel conductance.

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