Quantum-statistics-induced flow patterns in driven ideal Fermi gases

Abstract

While classical or quantum interacting liquids become turbulent under sufficiently strong driving, it is not obvious what flow pattern an ideal quantum gas develops under similar conditions. Unlike classical noninteracting particles which exhibit rather trivial flow, ideal fermions have to satisfy the exclusion principle, which acts as a form of collective repulsion. We thus study the flow of an ideal Fermi gas as it is driven out of a narrow orifice of width comparable to the Fermi wavelength, employing both a microcanonical approach to transport, and solving a Lindblad equation for Markovian driving leads. Both methods are in good agreement and predict an outflowing current density with a complex microscopic pattern of vorticity in the steady state. Applying a bias of the order of the chemical potential results in a short-range correlated antiferromagnetic vorticity pattern, corresponding to local moments of the order of a tenth of a magneton, $e\hslash /2m$, if the fermions are charged. The latter may be detectable by magnetosensitive spectroscopy in strongly driven cold gases (atoms) or clean electronic nanostructures (electrons).

10 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (11)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Third quantization: a general method to solve master equations for quadratic open Fermi systems
• Viscosity and scale invariance in the unitary Fermi gas
• Charge and spin transport in strongly correlated one-dimensional quantum systems driven far from equilibrium
• Observing the Drop of Resistance in the Flow of a Superfluid Fermi Gas
• Orthogonality catastrophe and shock waves in a non-equilibrium Fermi gas
• Negative differential conductivity in far-from-equilibrium quantum spin chains
• Quantum ripples over a semi-classical shock
• Dynamics of waves in 1D electron systems: Density oscillations driven by population inversion
• Quantum turbulence: From superfluid helium to atomic Bose-Einstein condensates
• Turbulence-induced magnetic flux asymmetry at nanoscale junctions

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Observation of Quantized Conductance in Neutral Matter
• Quantum transport in ultracold atoms
• Linking Spatial Distributions of Potential and Current in Viscous Electronics
• Landauer, Kubo, and microcanonical approaches to quantum transport and noise: A comparison and implications for cold-atom dynamics
• A scanning gate microscope for cold atomic gases
• Tunable current circulation in triangular quantum-dot metastructures
• Ultrafast dynamics of cold Fermi gas after a local quench