Sondheimer oscillations as a probe of non-ohmic flow in WP2 crystals

As conductors in electronic applications shrink, microscopic conduction processes lead to strong deviations from Ohm’s law. Depending on the length scales of momentum conserving (lMC) and relaxing (lMR) electron scattering, and the device size (d), current flows may shift from ohmic to ballistic to hydrodynamic regimes. So far, an in situ methodology to obtain these parameters within a micro/nanodevice is critically lacking. In this context, we exploit Sondheimer oscillations, semi-classical magnetoresistance oscillations due to helical electronic motion, as a method to obtain lMR even when lMR ≫ d. We extract lMR from the Sondheimer amplitude in WP2, at temperatures up to T ~ 40 K, a range most relevant for hydrodynamic transport phenomena. Our data on μm-sized devices are in excellent agreement with experimental reports of the bulk lMR and confirm that WP2 can be microfabricated without degradation. These results conclusively establish Sondheimer oscillations as a quantitative probe of lMR in micro-devices.

Critical behaviour of hydrodynamic series

We investigate the time-dependent perturbations of strongly coupled $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 4 SYM theory at finite temperature and finite chemical potential with a second order phase transition. This theory is modelled by a top-down Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton description which is a consistent truncation of the dimensional reduction of type IIB string theory on AdS5×S5. We focus on spin-1 and spin-2 sectors of perturbations and compute the linearized hydrodynamic transport coefficients up to the third order in gradient expansion. We also determine the radius of convergence of the hydrodynamic mode in spin-1 sector and the lowest non-hydrodynamic modes in spin-2 sector. Analytically, we find that all the hydrodynamic quantities have the same critical exponent near the critical point θ = $$ \frac{1}{2} $$ 1 2 . Moreover, we propose a relation between symmetry enhancement of the underlying theory and vanishing of the only third order hydrodynamic transport coefficient θ1, which appears in the shear dispersion relation of a conformal theory on a flat background.