Are negative capacitances and negative viscosities similar?

Abstract

In a recent provocative paper Landauer posed the question of the existence of negative capacitances in ferroelectrics and arrived at the conclusion that negative differential dielectric constants are permissible in stable steady states. A comparison of capacitances and viscosities in general systems is undertaken in order to show that the idea of negative capacitances in ferroelectrics is in many ways similar to the idea of negative viscosities in complex fluid systems, such as liquid crystals, and fluids that approach turbulence. Reverse analogies then suggest tensor formulation of capacitances as well as internal disorder at the onset of negative capacitance manifestations.