English

Diffusive and subdiffusive spin transport in the ergodic phase of a many-body localizable system

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks 2016-07-27 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We study high temperature spin transport in a disordered Heisenberg chain in the ergodic regime. By employing a density matrix renormalization group technique for the study of the stationary states of the boundary-driven Lindblad equation we are able to study extremely large systems (400 spins). We find both a diffusive and a subdiffusive phase depending on the strength of the disorder and on the anisotropy parameter of the Heisenberg chain. Studying finite-size effects we show numerically and theoretically that a very large crossover length exists that controls the passage of a clean-system dominated dynamics to one observed in the thermodynamic limit. Such a large length scale, being larger than the sizes studied before, explains previous conflicting results. We also predict spatial profiles of magnetization in steady states of generic nondiffusive systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1604.08567,
  title  = {Diffusive and subdiffusive spin transport in the ergodic phase of a many-body localizable system},
  author = {Marko Znidaric and Antonello Scardicchio and Vipin Kerala Varma},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1604.08567},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

v2: updated phase diagram; 9 pages