Spinon heat transport and spin-phonon interaction in the antiferromagnetic spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain cuprates Sr2CuO3 and SrCuO2

Abstract

We have investigated the thermal conductivity κ_mag of high-purity single crystals of the spin chain compound Sr2CuO3 which is considered an excellent realization of the one-dimensional spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model. We find that the spinon heat conductivity κ_mag is strongly enhanced as compared to previous results obtained on samples with lower chemical purity. The analysis of κ_mag allows to compute the spinon mean free path l_mag as a function of temperature. At low-temperature we find l_mag\sim0.5\mum, corresponding to more than 1200 chain unit cells. Upon increasing the temperature, the mean free path decreases strongly and approaches an exponential decay ~1/T*exp(T*/T) which is characteristic for umklapp processes with the energy scale k_B T*. Based on Matthiesen's rule we decompose l_mag into a temperature-independent spinon-defect scattering length l0 and a temperature dependent spinon-phonon scattering length l_sp(T). By comparing l_mag(T) of Sr2CuO3 with that of SrCuO2, we show that the spin-phonon interaction, as expressed by l_sp is practically the same in both systems. The comparison of the empirically derived l_sp with model calculations for the spin-phonon interaction of the one-dimensional spin-1/2 XY model yields reasonable agreement with the experimental data.

revised version, accepted by: Journal of Statistical Mechanics: theory and experiment

References in corpus (7)

• Heat conduction in low-dimensional quantum magnets
• Thermal transport of the XXZ chain in a magnetic field
• Evidence for Ballistic Thermal Conduction in the One-Dimensional S=1/2 Heisenberg Antiferromagnetic Spin System Sr2CuO3
• Magnon Heat Conductivity and Mean Free Paths in Two-Leg Spin Ladders: A Model-Independent Determination
• Enhancement of Thermal Conductivity due to Spinons in the One-Dimensional Spin System SrCuO_2
• Bond disorder and breakdown of ballistic heat transport in the spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain as seen in Ca-doped SrCuO2
• Thermal drag revisited: Boltzmann versus Kubo

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