Consistency of the phenomenological theories of wave-type heat transport with the hydrodynamics of a phonon gas

Abstract

Various phenomenological theories of wave-type heat transport, which can be interpreted as the models of an isotropic rigid heat conductor with an internal vector state variable, have been proposed in the literature with the objective to describe the second sound propagation in dielectric crystals. The aim of this paper is to analyze the relation between these phenomenological approaches and the phonon gas hydrodynamics. The four-moment phonon gas hydrodynamics based on the maximum entropy closure of the moment equations with nonlinear isotropic phonon dispersion relation is considered for this purpose. We reformulate the equations of this hydrodynamics in terms of energy and quasi-momentum as the primitive fields and subsequently demonstrate that, from the macroscopic point of view, they can be understood as describing the reference model of an isotropic rigid heat conductor with quasi-momentum playing the role of the internal vector state variable. This model is determined by the entropy function and the additional scalar potential, but if the finite domain of phonon wave vectors is approximated by the whole space, the additional potential can be expressed in terms of the entropy function and its first derivatives. Then the transformation of primitive fields and the expansion of thermodynamic potentials in powers of the square of quasi-momentum enable us to compare the reference model with the models proposed earlier in the literature. It is shown that the previous models require some subtle modifications in order to achieve full consistency with phonon gas hydrodynamics.