Viscosity spectral functions of the dilute Fermi gas in kinetic theory

Abstract

We compute the viscosity spectral function of the dilute Fermi gas for different values of the s-wave scattering length $a$, including the unitarity limit $a\to\infty$. We perform the calculation in kinetic theory by studying the response to a non-trivial background metric. We find the expected structure consisting of a diffusive peak in the transverse shear channel and a sound peak in the longitudinal channel. At zero momentum the width of the diffusive peak is $\omega_0\simeq (2\epsilon)/(3\eta)$ where $\epsilon$ is the energy density and $\eta$ is the shear viscosity. At finite momentum the spectral function approaches the collisionless limit and the width is of order $\omega_0\sim k(T/m)^{1/2}$.