Electron Hydrodynamics: Viscosity Tensor and effects of a Magnetic field

TL;DR

This paper investigates electron hydrodynamics in 2D systems, focusing on the viscosity tensor and vortical transport coefficients influenced by Berry curvature and magnetic fields, revealing new odd components and extending Onsager relations.

Contribution

It derives the viscosity tensor including Berry curvature effects and extends the Onsager relations to incorporate magnetic fields and Berry curvature in electron hydrodynamics.

Findings

Berry curvature induces odd viscosity components.

Magnetic field affects vortical coefficients and viscosity tensor.

Results are consistent with extended Onsager relations.

Abstract

Transport due to electrons in ultra-clean two dimensional systems can be hydrodynamic in nature with the momentum of the electrons being conserved in the bulk. This hydrodynamic behavior coupled with effects of Berry curvature arising from band structure can give rise to novel vortical transport coefficients relating the stress tensor to gradients in the electrostatic potential and temperature. These coefficients have been calculated in the absence of a magnetic field and have been shown to depend only on the equilibrium distribution function~\cite{Chadha_Mukerjee2024}. In this paper, we first obtain an expression for the viscosity tensor and show that the Berry curvature generates odd components of the viscosity tensor arising from the intrinsic angular momentum of the Bloch wavepackets. We calculate the viscosity tensor for a two-dimensional microscopic model of tilted Dirac cones. We next obtain the vortical coefficients and the viscosity tensor in the presence of a magnetic field and extend the Onsager relations for them to include both the magnetic field and the Berry curvature. We show that the field dependence of the coefficients manifests itself in the non-equilibrium part of the distribution function and calculate them to second order in the electron-electron scattering time. We explicitly show that the expressions we obtain are consistent with the Onsager relations.