Transport coefficients from the boson Uehling-Uhlenbeck equation

Abstract

Expressions for the bulk viscosity, shear viscosity, and thermal conductivity of a quantum degenerate Bose gas above the critical temperature for Bose-Einstein condensation are derived using the Uehling-Uhlenbeck kinetic equation. For contact potentials and hard sphere interactions, the eigenvalues (relaxation rates) of the Uehling-Uhlenbeck collision operator have an upper cutoff. This cutoff requires summation over all discrete eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the collision operator when computing transport coefficients. We numerically compute the shear viscosity and thermal conductivity for any boson gas that interacts via a contact potential. We find that the bulk viscosity of the degenerate boson gas remains identically zero, as it is for the classical gas.