English

Superdiffusion from emergent classical solitons in quantum spin chains

Statistical Mechanics 2020-08-13 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons Quantum Physics

Abstract

Finite-temperature spin transport in the quantum Heisenberg spin chain is known to be superdiffusive, and has been conjectured to lie in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality class. Using a kinetic theory of transport, we compute the KPZ coupling strength for the Heisenberg chain as a function of temperature, directly from microscopics; the results agree well with density-matrix renormalization group simulations. We establish a rigorous quantum-classical correspondence between the "giant quasiparticles" that govern superdiffusion and solitons in the classical continuous Landau-Lifshitz ferromagnet. We conclude that KPZ universality has the same origin in classical and quantum integrable isotropic magnets: a finite-temperature gas of low-energy classical solitons.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2003.13708,
  title  = {Superdiffusion from emergent classical solitons in quantum spin chains},
  author = {Jacopo De Nardis and Sarang Gopalakrishnan and Enej Ilievski and Romain Vasseur},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.13708},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Published version, updated Fig 2 and supplemental material

R2 v1 2026-06-23T14:32:36.521Z