Probe particles in odd active viscoelastic fluids: How activity and dissipation determine linear stability

Odd viscoelastic materials are constrained by fewer symmetries than their even counterparts. The breaking of these symmetries allows these materials to exhibit different features, which have attracted considerable attention in recent years. Immersing a bead in such complex fluids allows for probing their physical properties, highlighting signatures of their oddity and exploring the consequences of these broken symmetries. We present the conditions under which the activity of an odd viscoelastic fluid can give rise to linear instabilities in the motion of the probe particle, and we unveil how the features of the probe particle dynamics depend on the oddity and activity of the viscoelastic medium in which it is immersed.

Odd Cosserat elasticity in active materials

Stress-strain constitutive relations in solids with an internal angular degree of freedom can be modeled using Cosserat (also called micropolar) elasticity. In this paper, we explore Cosserat materials that include chiral active components and hence odd elasticity. We calculate static elastic properties and show that the static response to rotational stresses leads to strains that depend on both Cosserat and odd elasticity. We compute the dispersion relations in odd Cosserat materials in the overdamped regime and find the presence of exceptional points. These exceptional points create a sharp boundary between a Cosserat-dominated regime of complete wave attenuation and an odd-elasticity-dominated regime of propagating waves. We conclude by showing the effect of Cosserat and odd-elasticity terms on the polarization of Rayleigh surface waves.

Lift force in odd compressible fluids

When a body moves through a fluid, it can experience a force orthogonal to its movement called lift force. Odd viscous fluids break parity and time-reversal symmetry, suggesting the existence of an odd lift force on tracer particles, even at vanishing Reynolds numbers and for symmetric geometries. It was previously found that an incompressible odd fluid cannot induce lift force on a tracer particle with no-slip boundary conditions, making signatures of odd viscosity in the two-dimensional bulk elusive. By computing the response matrix for a tracer particle, we show that an odd compressible fluid can produce an odd lift force. Using shell localization, we provide analytic expressions for the drag and odd lift forces acting on the tracer particle in a steady state and also at finite frequency. Importantly, we find that the existence of an odd lift force in a steady state requires taking into account the nonconservation of the fluid mass density due to the coupling between the two-dimensional surface and the three-dimensional bulk fluid.

Hydrodynamics of dipole-conserving fluids

Dipole-conserving fluids serve as examples of kinematically constrained systems that can be understood on the basis of symmetry. They are known to display various exotic features including glassylike dynamics, subdiffusive transport, and immobile excitations' dubbed fractons. Unfortunately, such systems have so far escaped a complete macroscopic formulation as viscous fluids. In this work, we construct a consistent hydrodynamic description for fluids invariant under translation, rotation, and dipole shift symmetry. We use symmetry principles to formulate a thermodynamic theory for dipole-conserving systems at equilibrium and apply irreversible thermodynamics in order to elucidate dissipative effects. Remarkably, we find that the inclusion of the energy conservation not only renders the longitudinal modes diffusive rather than subdiffusive but also diffusion is present even at the lowest order in the derivative expansion. This work paves the way towards an effective description of many-body systems with constrained dynamics such as ensembles of topological defects, fracton phases of matter, and certain models of glasses.

Passive odd viscoelasticity

Active chiral viscoelastic materials exhibit elastic responses perpendicular to the applied stresses, referred to as odd elasticity. We use a covariant formulation of viscoelasticity combined with an entropy production analysis to show that odd elasticity is not only present in active systems but also in broad classes of passive chiral viscoelastic fluids. In addition, we demonstrate that linear viscoelastic chiral solids require activity in order to manifest odd elastic responses. To model the phenomenon of passive odd viscoelasticity we propose a chiral extension of Jeffreys model. We apply our covariant formalism in order to derive the dispersion relations of hydrodynamic modes and obtain clear imprints of odd viscoelastic behavior.

Erratum: Active Viscoelasticity of Odd Materials [Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 138001 (2021)]

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.138001.

Super-Resonant Transport of Topological Surface States Subjected to In-Plane Magnetic Fields

Magnetic oscillations of Dirac surface states of topological insulators are typically expected to be associated with the formation of Landau levels or the Aharonov-Bohm effect. We instead study the conductance of Dirac surface states subjected to an in-plane magnetic field in the presence of a barrier potential. Strikingly, we find that, in the case of large barrier potentials, the surface states exhibit pronounced oscillations in the conductance when varying the magnetic field, in the absence of Landau levels or the Aharonov-Bohm effect. These novel magnetic oscillations are attributed to the emergence of super-resonant transport by tuning the magnetic field, in which many propagating modes cross the barrier with perfect transmission. In the case of small and moderate barrier potentials, we identify a positive magnetoconductance due to the increase of the Fermi surface by tilting the surface Dirac cone. Moreover, we show that for weak magnetic fields, the conductance displays a shifted sinusoidal dependence on the field direction with period π and phase shift determined by the tilting direction with respect to the field direction. Our predictions can be applied to various topological insulators, such as HgTe and Bi_{2}Se_{3}, and provide important insights into exploring and understanding exotic magnetotransport properties of topological surface states.

Active Viscoelasticity of Odd Materials

The mechanical response of active media ranging from biological gels to living tissues is governed by a subtle interplay between viscosity and elasticity. We generalize the canonical Kelvin-Voigt and Maxwell models to active viscoelastic media that break both parity and time-reversal symmetries. The resulting continuum theories exhibit viscous and elastic tensors that are both antisymmetric, or odd, under exchange of pairs of indices. We analyze how these parity violating viscoelastic coefficients determine the relaxation mechanisms and wave-propagation properties of odd materials.

Non-perturbative terahertz high-harmonic generation in the three-dimensional Dirac semimetal Cd3As2

Harmonic generation is a general characteristic of driven nonlinear systems, and serves as an efficient tool for investigating the fundamental principles that govern the ultrafast nonlinear dynamics. Here, we report on terahertz-field driven high-harmonic generation in the three-dimensional Dirac semimetal Cd3As2 at room temperature. Excited by linearly-polarized multi-cycle terahertz pulses, the third-, fifth-, and seventh-order harmonic generation is very efficient and detected via time-resolved spectroscopic techniques. The observed harmonic radiation is further studied as a function of pump-pulse fluence. Their fluence dependence is found to deviate evidently from the expected power-law dependence in the perturbative regime. The observed highly non-perturbative behavior is reproduced based on our analysis of the intraband kinetics of the terahertz-field driven nonequilibrium state using the Boltzmann transport theory. Our results indicate that the driven nonlinear kinetics of the Dirac electrons plays the central role for the observed highly nonlinear response.

Phenomenology of nonrelativistic parity-violating hydrodynamics in 2+1 dimensions

Parity-violating fluids in two spatial dimensions can appear in a variety of contexts such as liquid crystal films, anyon fluids, and quantum Hall fluids. Nonetheless, the consequences of parity violation on the solutions to the equations of motion are largely unexplored. In this paper, we explore phenomenological consequences of parity violation through simple, illustrative examples. Although incompressible velocity fields are essentially unchanged by parity violation, we discuss examples where parity violation plays a role at boundaries, or in the dynamics of temperature. We then discuss types of compressible flows which only exist in a parity-violating fluid, including sound waves, and solitons in the dissipationless limit. We conclude with a discussion of some curious features in Rayleigh-Bénard convection of a parity-violating fluid.

Hydrodynamics with triangle anomalies

We consider the hydrodynamic regime of theories with quantum anomalies for global currents. We show that a hitherto discarded term in the conserved current is not only allowed by symmetries, but is in fact required by triangle anomalies and the second law of thermodynamics. This term leads to a number of new effects, one of which is chiral separation in a rotating fluid at nonzero chemical potential. The new kinetic coefficients can be expressed, in a unique fashion, through the anomaly coefficients and the equation of state. We briefly discuss the relevance of this new hydrodynamic term for physical situations, including heavy-ion collisions.

Consistent holographic description of boost-invariant plasma

Prior attempts to construct the gravity dual of boost-invariant flow of N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills gauge theory plasma suffered from apparent curvature singularities in the late-time expansion. This Letter shows how these problems can be resolved by a different choice of expansion parameter. The calculations presented correctly reproduce the plasma energy-momentum tensor within the framework of second-order viscous hydrodynamics.