English

Drude weight in systems with open boundary conditions

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2020-11-23 v3 Materials Science Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

A many-electron conducting system undergoes free acceleration in response to a macroscopic field. The Drude weight DD---also called charge stiffness---measures the adiabatic (inverse) inertia of the electrons; the DD formal expression requires periodic boundary conditions. When instead a bounded sample is addressed within open boundary conditions, no current flows and a constant (external) field only polarizes the sample: the Faraday cage effect. Nonetheless a low-frequency field induces forced oscillations: we show here that the low-frequency linear response of the bounded system is dominated by the adiabatic inertia and allows an alternative evaluation of DD. Simulations on model one-dimensional systems demonstrate our main message.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.04143,
  title  = {Drude weight in systems with open boundary conditions},
  author = {Gabriele Bellomia and Raffaele Resta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.04143},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

8 pages, 6 figures | Minor corrections w.r.t. v2 (mostly typos) | Accepted for pubblication in Phys. Rev. B

R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:57:09.941Z