Negative differential conductivity in far-from-equilibrium quantum spin chains

Abstract

We show that, when a finite anisotropic Heisenberg spin-1/2 chain in the gapped regime is driven far from equilibrium, oppositely polarized ferromagnetic domains build up at the edges of the chain, thus suppressing quantum spin transport. As a consequence, a negative differential conductivity regime arises, where increasing the driving decreases the current. The above results are explained in terms of magnon localization and are shown to be structurally stable against breaking of integrability.

5 pages, 4 figures. Published version

References in corpus (5)

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Charge and spin transport in strongly correlated one-dimensional quantum systems driven far from equilibrium
• A real-time study of diffusive and ballistic transport in spin-1/2 chains using the adaptive time-dependent density matrix renormalization group method
• Equivalence of transport coefficients in bath-induced and dynamical scenarios