A resistor at finite temperature produces white noise fluctuations of the current called Johnson-Nyquist noise. Measuring the amplitude of this noise provides a powerful primary thermometry technique to access the electron temperature. In practical situations, however, one needs to generalize the Johnson-Nyquist theorem to handle spatially inhomogeneous temperature profiles. Recent work provided such a generalization for Ohmic devices obeying the Wiedemann-Franz law, but there is a need to provide a similar generalization for hydrodynamic electron systems, since hydrodynamic electrons provide unusual sensitivity for Johnson noise thermometry but they do not admit a local conductivity nor obey the Wiedemann-Franz law. Here we address this need by considering low-frequency Johnson noise in the hydrodynamic setting for a rectangular geometry. Unlike in the Ohmic setting, we find that the Johnson noise is geometry dependent due to nonlocal viscous gradients. Nonetheless, ignoring the geometric correction only leads to an error of at most 40% as compared to naively using the Ohmic result.

• Received 21 November 2022
• Accepted 4 May 2023

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.256301