The algebraic structure of the gradient expansion in linearised classical hydrodynamics

TL;DR

This work formalises the gradient expansion ambiguities in linearised classical hydrodynamics via frame and on-shell transformations, showing their universal action on dispersion relations and retarded correlators. By constructing invariants such as the hydrodynamic polynomials I and Y^{ab}, it isolates physical content from artefacts of truncation, and reveals a nilpotent Lie-group structure governing these transformations. The framework yields equivalence classes of hydrodynamic theories that share the same low-energy data and provides a practical route to match hydrodynamic theories to microscopic models. The diffusion example concretely demonstrates how invariants emerge and how gapped modes can be manipulated without affecting physically reliable hydrodynamic predictions.

Abstract

In this work, we systematically treat the ambiguities that generically arise in the gradient expansion of any hydrodynamic theory. While these ambiguities do not affect the physical content of the equations, they induce two types of transformations in the space of transport coefficients. The first type is known as the 'frame' transformations, and amounts to field redefinitions. The second type, which we introduce and formalise here, we term the 'on-shell' transformations. This identifies equivalence classes of hydrodynamic theories that provide an equally valid low-energy description of the underlying microscopic theory. We show that in any (classical) theory of hydrodynamics (at arbitrary order in derivatives), the action of such transformations on the dispersion relations and two-point correlation functions is universal. We explicitly construct invariants which can then be matched to a microscopic theory. Among them are, expectedly, the low-momentum expansions of the hydrodynamic modes. The (unphysical) gapped modes can, however, be added or removed at will. Finally, we show that such transformations assign a nilpotent Lie group to every hydrodynamic theory, and discuss the related algebraic properties underlying classical hydrodynamics.