Shear viscosity and damping of collective modes in a two-dimensional Fermi gas

Abstract

We compute the shear viscosity of a two dimensional Fermi gas interacting via a short range potential with scattering length $a_{2d}$ in kinetic theory. We find that kinetic theory predicts that the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio of a strongly interacting two dimensional gas is comparable to that of the three dimensional unitary gas. We use our results to compute the damping of collective modes in a trapped Fermi gas, and compare to experimental data recently obtained in E. Vogt et al., arXiv:1111.1173.

Comments: 12 pages, 2 figures; text revised, corrected error in data for <\alpha> and incorrect value for N in theory vs data plot