Anomalous Diffusion and Singular Transport from Hydrodynamic Recoupling
Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 196304 – Published 6 November, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/bzz4-ggnm
Abstract
In charge neutral fluids, such as the Dirac fluid in graphene at the Dirac point, charge transport remains diffusive despite the presence of ballistically propagating sound waves: sound waves “hydrodynamically decouple” from the slower charge fluctuations. For quasi-one-dimensional charge neutral fluids, we show that this convective charge diffusion is not smoothly connected to the normal diffusion that arises when momentum conservation is broken by noise (or static impurities). Instead, the charge diffusion constant is a discontinuous function of noise, which (in the weak-noise limit) depends only on the ratio of momentum and energy relaxation rates. In the special limit of momentum-conserving noise (e.g., spatially uniform fluctuations of the Hamiltonian), the diffusion constant diverges in the presence of noise. We describe the resulting superdiffusion in terms of coupled Burgers equations. We present a general mechanism—hydrodynamic recoupling—by which weak noise can induce singular changes in transport coefficients. Our results highlight the limits of zero-noise extrapolation for predicting dynamical quantities like diffusion constants.
