High-temperature coherent transport in the XXZ chain in the presence of an impurity

Abstract

We study high-temperature spin transport through an anisotropic spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain in which integrability is broken by a single impurity close to the center of the chain. For a finite impurity strength, the level spacing statistics of this model is known to be Wigner-Dyson. Our aim is to understand if this integrability breaking is manifested in the high-temperature spin transport. We focus first on the nonequilibrium steady state (NESS), where the chain is connected to spin baths that act as sources and sinks for spin excitations at the boundaries. Using a combination of open quantum system theory and matrix product operators techniques, we extract the transport properties by means of a finite-size scaling of the spin current in the NESS. Our results indicate that, despite the formation of a partial domain wall in the steady state magnetization (and despite the Wigner-Dyson level spacing distribution of the model), transport remains ballistic. We contrast this behavior with the one produced by a staggered magnetic field in the XXZ chain, for which it is known that transport is diffusive. By performing a numerical computation of the real part of the spin conductivity, we show that our findings are consistent with linear response theory. We discuss subtleties associated with the apparent vanishing of the Drude in the presence of an impurity.

Journal-reviewed version. Editor's suggestion. 15 pages, 14 figures

References in corpus (21)

• The density-matrix renormalization group in the age of matrix product states
• Thermalization and its mechanism for generic isolated quantum systems
• Matrix Product States, Projected Entangled Pair States, and variational renormalization group methods for quantum spin systems
• Heat Transport in low-dimensional systems
• Breakdown of thermalization in finite one-dimensional systems
• Spin transport in a one-dimensional anisotropic Heisenberg model
• Thermalization near integrability in a dipolar quantum Newton's cradle
• Charge and spin transport in strongly correlated one-dimensional quantum systems driven far from equilibrium
• Transport in a disordered tight-binding chain with dephasing
• Non-integrability and the Fourier heat conduction law
• Negative differential conductivity in far-from-equilibrium quantum spin chains
• Spin and energy currents in integrable and nonintegrable spin-1/2 chains: A typicality approach to real-time autocorrelations
• Charges and currents in quantum spin chains: late-time dynamics and spontaneous currents
• Drude weight in systems with open boundary conditions
• Incoherent transport induced by a single static impurity in a Heisenberg chain
• Energy transport in a disordered spin chain with broken U(1) symmetry: Diffusion, subdiffusion, and many-body localization
• Heat, Work and Energy Currents in the Boundary-Driven XXZ Spin Chain
• Conservation Laws and Thermodynamic Efficiencies
• The open Heisenberg chain under boundary fields: a magnonic logic gate
• Thermal transport in a spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain coupled to a (non) magnetic impurity
• Transport properties of a spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain with an embedded spin-S impurity

Cited by in corpus (51)

• Finite-temperature transport in one-dimensional quantum lattice models
• Can we study the many-body localisation transition?
• Krylov complexity from integrability to chaos
• Many-Body Localization in the Age of Classical Computing
• Eigenstate Thermalization in a Locally Perturbed Integrable System
• Eigenstate thermalization and quantum chaos in the Holstein polaron model
• Low-frequency behavior of off-diagonal matrix elements in the integrable XXZ chain and in a locally perturbed quantum-chaotic XXZ chain
• Tensor-network method to simulate strongly interacting quantum thermal machines
• Speck of Chaos
• Eigenstate thermalization hypothesis through the lens of autocorrelation functions
• Onset of many-body quantum chaos due to breaking integrability
• Multipartite entanglement structure in the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis
• Weak integrability breaking: chaos with integrability signature in coherent diffusion
• Periodically refreshed baths to simulate open quantum many-body dynamics
• Generic transport formula for a system driven by Markovian reservoirs
• Eigenstate thermalization for observables that break Hamiltonian symmetries and its counterpart in interacting integrable systems
• Ballistic transport and boundary resistances in inhomogeneous quantum spin chains
• Lindblad equation approach to the optimal working point in nonequilibrium stationary states of an interacting electronic one-dimensional system: Application to the spinless Hubbard chain in the clean and in the weakly disordered limit
• Transport through interacting defects and lack of thermalisation
• Extensive Long-Range Entanglement in a Nonequilibrium Steady State
• Magnetization dynamics in clean and disordered spin-1 XXZ chains
• Bath assisted transport in a three-site spin chain: global {\sl vs} local approach
• Krylov complexity for non-local spin chains
• Ballistic-to-diffusive transition in spin chains with broken integrability
• Less is more: more scattering leading to less resistance
• Criteria for Davies Irreducibility of Markovian Quantum Dynamics
• Exact steady state of the open XX-spin chain: entanglement and transport properties
• Boundary Chaos
• Giant rectification in segmented, strongly interacting, spin chains despite the presence of perturbations
• Fermionic Magic Resources of Quantum Many-Body Systems
• Quantifying operator spreading and chaos in Krylov subspaces with quantum state reconstruction
• Non-equilibrium boundary driven quantum systems: models, methods and properties
• Exact asymptotics of long-range quantum correlations in a nonequilibrium steady state
• Classification of same-gate quantum circuits and their space-time symmetries with application to the level-spacing distribution
• Entanglement in dual unitary quantum circuits with impurities
• Interaction-induced transition in quantum many-body detection probability
• Absence of thermalization of free systems coupled to gapped interacting reservoirs
• From Dyson Models to Many-Body Quantum Chaos
• Evaluating thermal expectation values by almost ideal sampling with Trotter gates
• Extensive Long-Range Entanglement at Finite Temperatures from a Nonequilibrium Bias
• Scaling of diffusion constants in perturbed easy-axis Heisenberg spin chains
• Onset of Quantum Chaos and Ergodicity in Spin Systems with Highly Degenerate Hilbert Spaces
• Thermal Drude weight in an integrable chiral clock model
• Transition to chaos in extended systems and their quantum impurity models
• Local integrability breaking and exponential localization of leading Lyapunov vectors
• Boundary Chaos: Spectral Form Factor
• Dephasing enhanced transport in boundary-driven quasiperiodic chains
• On the difference between thermalization in open and isolated quantum systems: a case study
• Emergent Thermalization Thresholds in Unitary Dynamics of Inhomogeneously Disordered Quantum Systems
• Dynamical irreversibility and local decoherence in quantum many-body chaos
• Energy transport in Z3 chiral clock model