Ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density for trapped fermions in the unitarity limit

Abstract

We extract the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio $\ensuremath{\eta}/s$ of cold fermionic atoms in the unitarity limit from experimental data on the damping of collective excitations. We find that near the critical temperature $\ensuremath{\eta}/s$ is roughly equal to 1/2 in units of $\ensuremath{\hbar}/{k}_{B}$. With the possible exception of the quark gluon plasma, this value is closer to the conjectured lower bound $1/(4\ensuremath{\pi})$ than any other known liquid.