Algebraic structure of the gradient expansion in linearized classical hydrodynamics

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 formalize 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.