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arXiv:2205.11891 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

From dissipationless to normal diffusion in the easy-axis Heisenberg spin chain

Peter Prelovšek, Sourav Nandy, Zala Lenarčič, Marcin Mierzejewski, J. Herbrych

Published Dec 5, 2022• 14 citations
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Abstract

The anomalous spin diffusion of the integrable easy-axis Heisenberg chain originates in the ballistic transport of symmetry sectors with nonzero magnetization. Ballistic transport is replaced by normal dissipative transport in all magnetization sectors upon introducing the integrability-breaking perturbations, including external driving. Such behavior implies that the diffusion constant obtained for the integrable model is relevant for the spread of spin excitations but not for the spin conductivity. We present numerical results for closed systems and driven open systems, indicating that the diffusion constant shows a discontinuous variation as the function of perturbation strength.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.106.245104

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The anomalous spin diffusion of the integrable easy-axis Heisenberg chain originates in the ballistic transport of symmetry sectors with nonzero magnetization. Ballistic transport is replaced by normal dissipative transport in all magnetization sectors upon introducing the integrability-breaking perturbations, including external driving. Such behavior implies that the diffusion constant obtained for the integrable model is relevant for the spread of spin excitations but not for the spin conductivity. We present numerical results for closed systems and driven open systems, indicating that the diffusion constant shows a discontinuous variation as the function of perturbation strength.
We study transport in spin chains employing the Thouless approach based on the level sensitivity to the boundary conditions, RRR. Although spin transport in the integrable easy-axis XXZ model is diffusive, the corresponding RRR is much closer to ballistic chains than to chaotic diffusive systems. In the case of the grand canonical ensemble, this observation can be rigorously justified, while in the case of the canonical ensemble it can be demonstrated by numerical calculations. Integrability-breaking perturbation (IBP) strongly reduces RRR, which reveals a pronounced minimum at the crossover from anomalous diffusive to normal dissipative transport. This minimum coincides with the onset of the universality of the random matrix theory. Results for various IBPs suggest a discontinuous jump of the spin conductivity in the thermodynamic limit, and moreover that its value is proportional to the strength of the IBP.
Understanding the physics of the integrable spin-1/2 XXZ chain has witnessed substantial progress, due to the development and application of sophisticated analytical and numerical techniques. In particular, infinite-temperature magnetization transport has turned out to range from ballistic, over superdiffusive, to diffusive behavior in different parameter regimes of the anisotropy. Since integrability is rather the exception than the rule, a crucial question is the change of transport under integrability-breaking perturbations. This question includes the stability of superdiffusion at the isotropic point and the change of diffusion constants in the easy-axis regime. In our work, we study this change of diffusion constants by a variety of methods and cover both, linear response theory in the closed system and the Lindblad equation in the open system, where we throughout focus on periodic boundary conditions. In the closed system, we compare results from the recursion method to calculations for finite systems and find evidence for a continuous change of diffusion constants over the full range of perturbation strengths. In the open system weakly coupled to baths, we find diffusion constants in quantitative agreement with the ones in the closed system in a range of nonweak perturbations, but disagreement in the limit of weak perturbations. Using a simple model in this limit, we point out the possibility of a diverging diffusion constant in such an open system.
We address spin transport in the easy-axis Heisenberg spin chain subject to different integrability-breaking perturbations. We find subdiffusive spin transport characterized by dynamical exponent z = 4 up to a timescale parametrically long in the anisotropy. In the limit of infinite anisotropy, transport is subdiffusive at all times; for finite anisotropy, one eventually recovers diffusion at late times but with a diffusion constant independent of the strength of the perturbation and solely fixed by the value of the anisotropy. We provide numerical evidence for these findings, and we show how they can be understood in terms of the dynamical screening of the relevant quasiparticle excitations and effective dynamical constraints. Our results show that the diffusion constant of near-integrable diffusive spin chains is generically not perturbative in the integrability-breaking strength.
We demonstrate that a completely integrable classical mechanical model, namely the lattice Landau-Lifshitz classical spin chain, supports diffusive spin transport with a finite diffusion constant in the easy-axis regime, while in the easy-plane regime, it displays ballistic transport in the absence of any known relevant local or quasilocal constant of motion in the symmetry sector of the spin current. This surprising finding should open the way towards analytical computation of diffusion constants for integrable interacting systems and hints on the existence of new quasilocal classical conservation laws beyond the standard soliton theory.
Generalized hydrodynamics predicts universal ballistic transport in integrable lattice systems when prepared in generic inhomogeneous initial states. However, the ballistic contribution to transport can vanish in systems with additional discrete symmetries. Here we perform large scale numerical simulations of spin dynamics in the anisotropic Heisenberg XXZ spin 1/2 chain starting from an inhomogeneous mixed initial state which is symmetric with respect to a combination of spin reversal and spatial reflection. In the isotropic and easy-axis regimes we find non-ballistic spin transport which we analyse in detail in terms of scaling exponents of the transported magnetization and scaling profiles of the spin density. While in the easy-axis regime we find accurate evidence of normal diffusion, the spin transport in the isotropic case is clearly super-diffusive, with the scaling exponent very close to 2/3, but with universal scaling dynamics which obeys the diffusion equation in nonlinearly scaled time.
Diffusive transport is a ubiquitous phenomenon, yet the microscopic origin of diffusion in interacting physical systems remains a challenging question, irrespective of whether quantum effects are dominant or not. In this work, we study infinite temperature spin diffusion in a classical integrable, space-time discrete version of anisotropic Landau-Lifshitz magnet in the easy-axis regime, subjected to integrability-breaking perturbations. Our numerical results based on large-scale simulations reveal i) a sharp change in the spin diffusion constant as a function of perturbation strength in the thermodynamic limit and ii) a crossover from non-Gaussian to Gaussian statistics of magnetization transfer reflected in higher order cumulants under integrability breaking. Both our observations hint to the presence of non-trivial diffusion mechanism inherent to integrable systems.