Hydrodynamic gauge fixing and higher order hydrodynamic expansion

Abstract

Hydrodynamics is a powerful emergent theory for the large-scale behaviours in many-body systems, quantum or classical. It is a gradient series expansion, where different orders of spatial derivatives provide an effective description on different length scales. We here report the first general derivation of third-order, or "dispersive", terms in the hydrodynamic expansion. We obtain fully general Kubo-like expressions for the associated hydrodynamic coefficients, and we determine their expressions in quantum integrable models, introducing in this way purely quantum higher-order terms into generalised hydrodynamics. We emphasise the importance of hydrodynamic gauge fixing at diffusive order, where we claim that it is parity-time-reversal, and not time-reversal, invariance that is at the source of Einstein's relation, Onsager's reciprocal relations, the Kubo formula and entropy production. At higher hydrodynamic orders we introduce a more general, n-th order "symmetric" gauge, which we show implies the validity of the higher-order hydrodynamic description.