Journal of High Energy Physics (Nov 2021)

Relativistic spin hydrodynamics with torsion and linear response theory for spin relaxation

  • Masaru Hongo,
  • Xu-Guang Huang,
  • Matthias Kaminski,
  • Mikhail Stephanov,
  • Ho-Ung Yee

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP11(2021)150
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2021, no. 11
pp. 1 – 35

Abstract

Read online

Abstract Using the second law of local thermodynamics and the first-order Palatini formalism, we formulate relativistic spin hydrodynamics for quantum field theories with Dirac fermions, such as QED and QCD, in a torsionful curved background. We work in a regime where spin density, which is assumed to relax much slower than other non-hydrodynamic modes, is treated as an independent degree of freedom in an extended hydrodynamic description. Spin hydrodynamics in our approach contains only three non-hydrodynamic modes corresponding to a spin vector, whose relaxation time is controlled by a new transport coefficient: the rotational viscosity. We study linear response theory and observe an interesting mode mixing phenomenon between the transverse shear and the spin density modes. We propose several field-theoretical ways to compute the spin relaxation time and the rotational viscosity, via the Green-Kubo formula based on retarded correlation functions.

Keywords