English

Thermal conductivity of anisotropic and frustrated spin-1/2 chains

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2009-11-07 v2 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

We analyze the thermal conductivity of anisotropic and frustrated spin-1/2 chains using analytical and numerical techniques. This includes mean-field theory based on the Jordan-Wigner transformation, bosonization, and exact diagonalization of systems with N<=18 sites. We present results for the temperature dependence of the zero-frequency weight of the conductivity for several values of the anisotropy \Delta. In the gapless regime, we show that the mean-field theory compares well to known results and that the low-temperature limit is correctly described by bosonization. In the antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic gapped regime, we analyze the temperature dependence of the thermal conductivity numerically. The convergence of the finite-size data is remarkably good in the ferromagnetic case. Finally, we apply our numerical method and mean-field theory to the frustrated chain where we find a good agreement of these two approaches on finite systems. Our numerical data do not yield evidence for a diverging thermal conductivity in the thermodynamic limit in case of the antiferromagnetic gapped regime of the frustrated chain.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0208282,
  title  = {Thermal conductivity of anisotropic and frustrated spin-1/2 chains},
  author = {F. Heidrich-Meisner and A. Honecker and D. C. Cabra and W. Brenig},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0208282},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages REVTeX4 including 6 figures; published version, main modification: added emphasis that the data of our Fig. 3 point to a vanishing of the thermal Drude weight in the thermodynamic limit in this case