Noncommuting zero-noise and zero-frequency limits in particle-hole symmetric fluids

TL;DR

This paper investigates how particle-hole symmetry in charged fluids affects charge diffusion, revealing that noise can cause discontinuous changes in diffusion behavior and highlighting the limits of zero-noise extrapolation.

Contribution

It demonstrates that in particle-hole symmetric fluids, charge diffusion exhibits noncommuting limits with noise, and introduces the concept of hydrodynamic recoupling causing singular transport changes.

Findings

Charge diffusion is discontinuous with respect to noise.

Momentum-conserving noise leads to divergence in diffusion constant.

Weak noise can induce superdiffusion via hydrodynamic recoupling.

Abstract

In charged fluids obeying particle-hole symmetry, such as the Dirac fluid in graphene, charge transport is diffusive despite the presence of ballistically propagating sound waves: sound waves "hydrodynamically decouple" from the slower charge fluctuations. For quasi-one-dimensional fluids, we show that this symmetry-protected charge diffusion is not smoothly connected to the normal diffusion that arises when momentum conservation is broken by noise (or static impurities). Instead, the charge diffusion constant is a discontinuous function of noise, which (in the weak-noise limit) depends only on the ratio of momentum and energy relaxation rates. In the special limit of momentum-conserving noise (e.g., spatially uniform fluctuations of the Hamiltonian), the diffusion constant diverges in the presence of noise. We describe the resulting superdiffusion in terms of coupled Burgers equations. We present a general mechanism--hydrodynamic recoupling--by which weak noise can induce singular changes in transport coefficients. Our results highlight the limits of zero-noise extrapolation for predicting dynamical quantities like diffusion constants.