The ballistic to diffusive crossover in a weakly-interacting Fermi gas

Abstract: Charge and energy are expected to diffuse in interacting systems of fermions at finite temperatures, even in the absence of disorder, with the interactions inducing a crossover from the coherent and ballistic streaming of quasi-particles at early times, to incoherent diffusive behavior at late times. The relevant crossover timescales and the transport coefficients are both controlled by the strength of interactions. In this work we develop a numerical method to simulate such systems at high temperatures, applicable in a wide range of interaction strengths, by adapting Dissipation-assisted Operator Evolution (DAOE) to fermions. Our fermion DAOE, which approximates the exact dynamics by systematically discarding information from high $n$-point functions, is tailored to capture non-interacting dynamics exactly, thus providing a good starting point for the weakly interacting problem. Applying our method to a microscopic model of weakly interacting fermions, we numerically demonstrate that the crossover from ballistic to diffusive transport happens at a time $t_D\sim1/\Delta^{2}$ and that the diffusion constant similarly scales as $D \sim 1/\Delta^2$, where $\Delta$ is the interaction strength. We substantiate this scaling with a Fermi's golden rule calculation in the operator spreading picture, interpreting $t_D$ as the fermion-fermion scattering time and lifetime of the single-particle Green's function.