Origin of Temperature Gradient in Nonequilibrium Steady States in Weakly Coupled Quantum Spin Systems

Abstract

We study nonequilibrium steady states (NESSs) in quantum spin-1/2 chains in contact with two heat baths at different temperatures. We consider the weak-coupling limit both for spin-spin coupling in the system and for system-bath coupling. This setting allows us to treat NESSs with a nonzero temperature gradient analytically. We develop a perturbation theory for this weak-coupling situation and show a simple condition for the existence of nonzero temperature gradient. This condition is independent of the integrability of the system.

26 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Canonical Thermal Pure Quantum State
• Heat transport in the $XXZ$ spin chain: from ballistic to diffusive regimes and dephasing enhancement
• Transport in open spin chains: A Monte Carlo wave-function approach
• A perturbative method for nonequilibrium steady state of open quantum systems

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Nonequilibrium Steady States in the Weakly-Coupled XXZ Model