Hydrodynamic gauge fixing and higher order hydrodynamic expansion

Abstract

Abstract Hydrodynamics is a powerful emergent theory for the large-scale behaviours in many-body systems, quantum or classical. It is a gradient series expansion, where different orders of spatial derivatives provide an effective description on different length scales. We report the first fully general derivation of third-order, or ‘dispersive’, terms in the hydrodynamic expansion. Our derivation is based on general principles of statistical mechanics, along with the assumption that the complete set of local and quasi-local conserved densities constitutes a good set of emergent degrees of freedom. We obtain fully general Kubo-like expressions for the associated hydrodynamic coefficients (also known as Burnett coefficients), and we determine their exact form in quantum integrable models, introducing in this way purely quantum higher-order terms into generalised hydrodynamics. We emphasise the importance of hydrodynamic gauge fixing at diffusive order, where we claim that it is parity-time-reversal, and not time-reversal, invariance that is at the source of Einstein’s relation, Onsager’s reciprocal relations, the Kubo formula and entropy production. At higher hydrodynamic orders we introduce a more general, nth order ‘symmetric’ gauge, which we show implies the validity of the higher-order hydrodynamic description.