How small hydrodynamics can go

Numerous experimental and theoretical results in liquids and plasmas suggest the presence of a critical momentum at which the shear diffusion mode collides with a nonhydrodynamic relaxation mode, giving rise to propagating shear waves. This phenomenon, labeled "k-gap," could explain the surprising identification of a low-frequency elastic behavior in confined liquids. More recently, a formal study of the perturbative hydrodynamic expansion showed that critical points in complex space, such as the aforementioned k-gap, determine the radius of convergence of linear hydrodynamics-its regime of applicability. In this work, we combine the two new concepts, and we study the radius of convergence of linear hydrodynamics in "real liquids" by using several data from simulations and experiments. We generically show that the radius of convergence increases with temperature and it surprisingly decreases with the electromagnetic interactions coupling. More importantly, for all the systems considered, we find that such a radius is set by the Wigner–Seitz radius-the characteristic interatomic distance of the liquid, which provides a natural microscopic bound.