English

Heat conduction in harmonic chains with Levy-type disorder

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks 2019-11-05 v1 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

We consider heat transport in one-dimensional harmonic chains attached at its ends to Langevin heat baths. The harmonic chain has mass impurities where the separation dd between any two successive impurities is randomly distributed according to a power-law distribution P(d)1/dα+1P(d)\sim 1/d^{\alpha+1}, being α>0\alpha>0. In the regime where the first moment of the distribution is well defined (1<α<21<\alpha<2) the thermal conductivity κ\kappa scales with the system size NN as κN(α3)/α\kappa\sim N^{(\alpha-3)/\alpha} for fixed boundary conditions, whereas for free boundary conditions κN(α1)/α\kappa\sim N^{(\alpha-1)/\alpha} if N1N\gg1. When α=2\alpha=2, the inverse localization length λ\lambda scales with the frequency ω\omega as λω2lnω\lambda\sim \omega^2 \ln \omega in the low frequency regime, due to the logarithmic correction, the size scaling law of the thermal conductivity acquires a non-closed form. When α>2\alpha>2, the thermal conductivity scales as in the uncorrelated disorder case. The situation α<1\alpha<1 is only analyzed numerically, where λ(ω)ω2α\lambda(\omega)\sim \omega^{2-\alpha} which leads to the following asymptotic thermal conductivity: κN(α+1)/(2α)\kappa \sim N^{-(\alpha+1)/(2-\alpha)} for fixed boundary conditions and κN(1α)/(2α)\kappa \sim N^{(1-\alpha)/(2-\alpha)} for free boundary conditions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.00592,
  title  = {Heat conduction in harmonic chains with Levy-type disorder},
  author = {I. F. Herrera-Gonzalez and J. A. Mendez-Bermudez},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.00592},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

9 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:02:42.816Z