Recent experiments have observed hints of hydrodynamic electron flow in a number of materials, not all of which have an isotropic Fermi surface. We revisit these experiments in PdCoO 2 , a quasi-two-dimensional material whose Fermi surface is a rounded hexagon, and observe that the data appears quantitatively consistent with a non-hydrodynamic interpretation. Nevertheless, motivated by such experiments, we develop a simple model for the low temperature kinetics and hydrodynamics of a two-dimensional Fermi liquid with a polygonal Fermi surface. A geometric effect leads to a finite number of additional long-lived quasihydrodynamic "imbalance" modes and corresponding qualitative changes in transport at the ballistic-to-hydrodynamic crossover. In the hydrodynamic limit, we find incoherent diffusion and a new dissipative component of the viscosity tensor arising from the explicit breaking of rotational invariance by the Fermi surface. Finally, we compute the conductance of narrow channels across the ballistic-to-hydrodynamic crossover and demonstrate a modification of the Gurzhi effect that allows for non-monotonic temperature and width dependence in the channel conductance.

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One-dimensional photonic crystals with slowly varying, i.e. 'chirped', lattice period are responsible for broadband light reflectance in many diverse biological contexts, ranging from the shiny coatings of various beetles to the eyes of certain butterflies. We present a quantum scattering analogy for light reflection from these adiabatically chirped photonic crystals (ACPCs) and apply a WKB-type approximation to obtain a closed-form expression for the reflectance. From this expression we infer several design principles, including a differential equation for the chirp pattern required to elicit a given reflectance spectrum and the minimal number of bilayers required to exceed a desired reflectance threshold. Comparison of the number of bilayers found in ACPCs throughout nature and our predicted minimal required number also gives a quantitative measure of the optimality of chirped biological reflectors. Together these results elucidate the design principles of chirped reflectors in nature and their possible application to future optical technologies.

Universal scaling terms occurring in Rényi entanglement entropies have the potential to bring new understanding to quantum critical points in free and interacting systems. Quantitative comparisons between analytical continuum theories and numerical calculations on lattice models play a crucial role in advancing such studies. In this paper, we exactly calculate the universal two-cylinder shape dependence of entanglement entropies for free bosons on finite-size square lattices, and compare to approximate functions derived in the continuum using several different ansatzes. Although none of these ansatzes are exact in the thermodynamic limit, we find that numerical fits are in good agreement with continuum functions derived using the AdS/CFT correspondence, an extensive mutual information model, and a quantum Lifshitz model. We use fits of our lattice data to these functions to calculate universal scalars defined in the thin-cylinder limit, and compare to values previously obtained for the free boson field theory in the continuum.

When continuous rotational invariance of a two-dimensional fluid is broken to the discrete, dihedral subgroup D 6 -the point group of an equilateral triangle-the resulting anisotropic hydrodynamics breaks both spatial-inversion and time-reversal symmetries, while preserving their combination. In this work, we present the hydrodynamics of such D 6 fluids, identifying new symmetry-allowed dissipative terms in the hydrodynamic equations of motion. We propose two experiments-both involving high-purity solid-state materials with D 6 -invariant Fermi surfaces-that are sensitive to these new coefficients in a D 6 fluid of electrons. In particular, we propose a local current imaging experiment (which is present-day realizable with nitrogen vacancy center magnetometry) in a hexagonal device, whose D 6 -exploiting boundary conditions enable the unambiguous detection of these novel transport coefficients.