Asymmetry in energy versus spin transport in certain interacting, disordered systems

J. J. Mendoza-Arenas, M. Žnidarič, V. K. Varma, J. Goold, S. R. Clark, A. Scardicchio

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

36 Citations (Scopus)
359 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

We study energy transport in disordered XXZ spin-1/2 chains driven to nonequilibrium configurations by thermal reservoirs of different temperatures at the boundaries, using large-scale matrix product simulations. In particular we discuss the transition between diffusive and subdiffusive transport in sectors of zero and finite magnetization at high temperature. At large anisotropies we find that diffusive energy transport prevails over a large range of disorder strengths, which is in contrast to spin transport that is subdiffusive in the same regime for weak disorder. However, at finite magnetization both energy and spin currents decay as a function of the system size with the same exponent. We conclude that diffusion of energy is much more pervasive than that of magnetization in these disordered spin-1/2 systems, and occurs across a significant range of the interaction-disorder parameter phase space. We support the existence of this asymmetry, reminiscent of that in the clean limit, by an analytical estimation of diffusion constants for weak disorder.

Original languageEnglish
Article number094435
Number of pages9
JournalPhysical Review B
Volume99
Issue number9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 22 Mar 2019

Bibliographical note

6+3 pages; 4+2 figures

Keywords

  • cond-mat.dis-nn
  • cond-mat.str-el
  • quant-ph

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