We introduce new classes of hydrodynamic theories inspired by the recently discovered fracton phases of quantum matter. Fracton phases are characterized by elementary excitations (fractons) with restricted mobility. The hydrodynamic theories we introduce describe thermalization in systems with fracton-like mobility constraints, including fluids where charge and dipole moment are both locally conserved, and fluids where charge is conserved along every line or plane of a lattice. Each of these fluids is subdiffusive, and constitutes a new universality class of hydrodynamic behavior. There are infinitely many such classes, each with distinct subdiffusive exponents, all of which are captured by our formalism. Our framework naturally explains recent results on dynamics with constrained quantum circuits, as well as recent experiments with ultracold atoms in tilted optical lattices. We identify crisp experimental signatures of these novel hydrodynamics, and explain how they may be realized in near term ultracold atom experiments.
Low-energy dynamics of many-body fracton excitations necessary to describe topological defects should be governed by a novel type of hydrodynamic theory. We use a Poisson bracket approach to systematically derive hydrodynamic equations from conservation laws of scalar theories with fracton excitations. We study three classes of theories. In the first class we introduce a general action for a scalar with a shift symmetry linear in the spatial coordinates, whereas the second one correspond with a complex scalar, while the third class serves as a toy model for disclinations and dislocations propa…
We extend recent work on hydrodynamics with global multipolar symmetries -- known as "fracton hydrodynamics" -- to systems in which the multipolar symmetries are gauged. We refer to the latter as "fracton magnetohydrodynamics", in analogy to conventional magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), which governs systems with gauged charge conservation. We show that fracton MHD arises naturally from higher-rank Maxwell's equations and in systems with one-form symmetries obeying certain constraints; while we focus on "minimal" higher-rank generalizations of MHD that realize diffusion, our methods may also be use…
We present the nonlinear fluctuating hydrodynamics which governs the late time dynamics of a chaotic many-body system with simultaneous charge/mass, dipole/center of mass, and momentum conservation. This hydrodynamic effective theory is unstable below four spatial dimensions: dipole-conserving fluids at rest become unstable to fluctuations, and are governed not by hydrodynamics, but by a fractonic generalization of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class. We numerically simulate many-body classical dynamics in one-dimensional models with dipole and momentum conservation, and find evidence f…
We show that the simplest universality classes of fracton hydrodynamics in more than one spatial dimension, including isotropic theories of charge and dipole conservation, can exhibit hidden "quasiconservation laws", in which certain higher multipole moments can only decay due to dangerously irrelevant corrections to hydrodynamics. We present two simple examples of this phenomenon. Firstly, an isotropic dipole-conserving fluid in the infinite plane conserves an infinite number of "harmonic multipole charges" within linear response; we calculate the decay or growth of these charges due to dange…
Motivated by recent studies of fractons, we demonstrate that elasticity theory of a two-dimensional quantum crystal is dual to a fracton tensor gauge theory, providing a concrete manifestation of the fracton phenomenon in an ordinary solid. The topological defects of elasticity theory map onto charges of the tensor gauge theory, with disclinations and dislocations corresponding to fractons and dipoles, respectively. The transverse and longitudinal phonons of crystals map onto the two gapless gauge modes of the gauge theory. The restricted dynamics of fractons matches with constraints on the mo…
We study the concomitant breaking of spatial translations and dilatations in Ginzburg-Landau-like models, where the dynamics responsible for the symmetry breaking is described by an effective Mexican hat potential for spatial gradients. We show that there are fractonic modes with either subdimensional propagation or no propagation altogether, namely, immobility. Such class of effective field theories encompasses instances of helical superfluids and meta-fluids, where fractons can be connected to an emergent symmetry under higher moment charges, leading in turns to the trivialization of some el…
We investigate the coupled dynamics of charge and energy in interacting lattice models with dipole conservation. We formulate a generic hydrodynamic theory for this combination of fractonic constraints and numerically verify its applicability to the late-time dynamics of a specific bosonic quantum system by developing a microscopic non-equilibrium quantum field theory. Employing a self-consistent $1/N$ approximation in the number of field components, we extract all entries of a generalized diffusion matrix and determine their dependence on microscopic model parameters. We discuss the relation …
We revisit a model for gapped fractonic order in (2+1) dimensions (a symmetric-traceless tensor gauge theory with conservation of dipole and trace-quadrupole moments described in \cite{Prem:2017kxc}) and compute its ground-state entanglement entropy on $\mathbb R^2$. Along the way, we quantize the theory on open subsets of $\mathbb R^2$ which gives rise to gapless edge excitations that are Lifshitz-type scalar theories. We additionally explore varieties of gauge-invariant extended operators and rephrase the fractonic physics in terms of the local deformability of these operators. We explore si…
Turbulent flows of incompressible liquid in two dimensions are comprised of dense systems of vortices. Such system of vortices can be treated as a fluid and itself could be described in terms of hydrodynamics. We develop the hydrodynamics of the vortex fluid. This hydrodynamics captures characteristics of fluid flows averaged over fast circulations in the inter-vortex space. The hydrodynamics of the vortex fluid features the anomalous stress absent in Euler's hydrodynamics. The anomalous stress yields a number of interesting effects. Some of them are: a deflection of stream lines, a correction…
Relativistic fluids are Lorentz invariant, and a non-relativistic limit of such fluids leads to the well-known Navier-Stokes equation. However, for fluids moving with respect to a reference system, or in critical systems with generic dynamical exponent z, the assumption of Lorentz invariance (or its non-relativistic version) does not hold. We are thus led to consider the most general fluid assuming only homogeneity and isotropy and study its hydrodynamics and transport behaviour. Remarkably, such systems have not been treated in full generality in the literature so far. Here we study these equ…
We show that the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect can be phenomenologically described as a special flow of a quantum incompressible Euler liquid. This flow consists of a large number of vortices of the same chirality. In this approach each vortex is identified with an electron while the fluid is neutral. We show that the Laughlin wave function emerges as a stationary flow of the system of vortices in quantum fluid dynamics. Subtle features of FQHE such as effects of Lorentz shear stress, the spectral function, the Hall current in a modulated electric fields, etc., naturally follow from the hydro…
We analyze a hydrodynamical model of a polar fluid in (3+1)-dimensional spacetime. We explore a spacetime symmetry -- volume preserving diffeomorphisms -- to construct an effective description of this fluid in terms of a topological BF theory. The two degrees of freedom of the BF theory are associated to the mass (charge) flows of the fluid and its polarization vorticities. We discuss the quantization of this hydrodynamic theory, which generically allows for fractionalized excitations. We propose an extension of the Girvin-MacDonald-Platzman algebra to (3+1)-dimensional spacetime by the inclus…
Materials with strongly-correlated electrons exhibit interesting phenomena such as metal-insulator transitions and high-temperature superconductivity. In stark contrast to ordinary metals, electron transport in these materials is thought to resemble the flow of viscous fluids. Despite their differences, it is predicted that transport in both, conventional and correlated materials, is fundamentally limited by the uncertainty principle applied to energy dissipation. Here we discover hydrodynamic electron flow in the Weyl-semimetal tungsten phosphide (WP2). Using thermal and magneto-electric tran…
It is shown that gauge theories with fermions are most naturally studied via a polar decomposition of the field variable. This is the fermionic analog of the preprint cond-mat/0210673. The hope is that these two put together will enable the treatment of neutral nonrelativisitc matter composed of electrons and nuclei in a nonperturbative manner with nuclei and electrons treated on an equal footing. We recast the electron-phonon (superconductivity) problem in the hydrodynamic language and indicate how it is solved. In particular we focus on the a.c. conductivity.
We present a general scheme to approach the space - time evolution of deformations, currents, and the electric field in charge density waves related to appearance of intrinsic topological defects: dislocations, their loops or pairs, and solitons. We derive general equations for the multi-fluid hydrodynamics taking into account the collective mode, electric field, normal electrons, and the intrinsic defects. These equations may allow to study the transformation of injected carriers from normal electrons to new periods of the charge density wave, the collective motion in constrained geometry, an…
Large-scale electrical and thermal currents in ordinary metals are well approximated by effective medium theory: global transport properties are governed by the solution to homogenized coupled diffusion equations. In some metals, including the Dirac fluid of nearly charge neutral graphene, microscopic transport is not governed by diffusion, but by a more complicated set of linearized hydrodynamic equations, which form a system of degenerate elliptic equations coupled with the Stokes equation for fluid velocity. In sufficiently inhomogeneous media, these hydrodynamic equations reduce to homogen…
