Hydrodynamics with helical symmetry

TL;DR

This paper develops a hydrodynamic framework for fluids with helical symmetry, revealing new non-dissipative coefficients and demonstrating their emergence through microscopic and effective field theory methods, with potential applications to cholesteric liquid crystals.

Contribution

It introduces the first comprehensive hydrodynamic description of fluids with helical symmetry, including novel coefficients and their microscopic origins.

Findings

Identification of non-dissipative helical hydrodynamic coefficients.

Demonstration of these phenomena via kinetic theory.

Potential relevance to cholesteric liquid crystals.

Abstract

We present the hydrodynamics of fluids in three spatial dimensions with helical symmetry, wherein only a linear combination of a rotation and translation is conserved in one of the three directions. The hydrodynamic degrees of freedom consist of scalar densities (e.g. energy or charge) along with two velocity fields transverse to the helical axis when the corresponding momenta are conserved. Nondissipative hydrodynamic coefficients reminiscent of chiral vortical coefficients arise. We write down microscopic Hamiltonian dynamical systems exhibiting helical symmetry, and we demonstrate using kinetic theory that these systems will generically exhibit the new helical phenomena that we predicted within hydrodynamics. We also confirm our findings using modern effective field theory techniques for hydrodynamics. We postulate regimes where pinned cholesteric liquid crystals may possess transport coefficients of a helical fluid, which appear to have been overlooked in previous literature.