The crossover from classical to quantum transport in a weakly-interacting Fermi gas

Abstract

We present an exact solution of the quantum kinetic equation of a weakly interacting Fermi gas in the crossover from the degenerate Fermi-liquid regime to the classical Boltzmann gas. We construct families of orthogonal polynomials tailored to each angular momentum channel, enabling a fast and systematically improvable decomposition of the phase-space distribution. This approach yields accurate, non-variational predictions for the shear viscosity, thermal diffusivity, and spin diffusivity to leading order in the scattering length. We demonstrate that the commonly used relaxation-time approximation fails dramatically at low temperature--by up to 25%. Our method provides a numerically efficient framework for benchmarking transport in strongly correlated regimes and for simulating the kinetics of quantum gases beyond hydrodynamics.