Kinetic theory of spin diffusion and superdiffusion in XXZ spin chains

Abstract

We address the nature of spin transport in the integrable XXZ spin chain, focusing on the isotropic Heisenberg limit. We calculate the diffusion constant using a kinetic picture based on generalized hydrodynamics combined with Gaussian fluctuations: we find that it diverges, and show that a self-consistent treatment of this divergence gives superdiffusion, with an effective time-dependent diffusion constant that scales as $D(t)\sim t^{1/3}$. This exponent had previously been observed in large-scale numerical simulations, but had not been theoretically explained. We briefly discuss XXZ models with easy-axis anisotropy $\Delta >1$. Our method gives closed-form expressions for the diffusion constant $D$ in the infinite-temperature limit for all $\Delta >1$. We find that $D$ saturates at large anisotropy, and diverges as the Heisenberg limit is approached, as $D\sim (\Delta -1{)}^{-1/2}$.

6 pages, 1 figure