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arXiv:2606.09308 · Physical review. D/Physical review. D.

Energy Transport in Randomly Coupled Quantum Systems: A Perturbative Approach

Tingfei Li, Runyu Chen

quant-phcond-mat.stat-mechhep-thSubmitted Jun 8, 2026• Announced Jun 9, 2026• 0 citations• Revised Jun 20, 2026 (v2)
v1 · Jun 8, 2026v2 · Jun 20, 2026
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Abstract

We study energy transport between two quantum systems coupled through a random interaction. The central feature of our approach is to model the coupling as a Gaussian random matrix, which enables a simple and systematic perturbative expansion. In the large-$N$ limit, we derive explicit expressions for the energy transfer rate and heat conductance up to second order in the coupling strength. Using spectral methods and diagrammatic expansions, we obtain the leading- and next-to-leading-order contributions to the energy transfer rate. We illustrate our results through explicit calculations for Gaussian, constant, semicircular, and Gamma densities of states.

Comments
28 pages, fixed some typos and added citations

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We study electrical transport at quantum critical points (QCPs) associated with loop current ordering in a metal, focusing specifically on models of the “Hertz-Millis” type. At the infrared (IR) fixed point and in the absence of disorder, the simplest such models have infinite DC conductivity and zero incoherent conductivity at nonzero frequencies. However, we find that a particular deformation, involving N N species of bosons and fermions with random couplings in flavor space, admits a finite incoherent, frequency-dependent conductivity at the IR fixed point, \sigma(\omega>0)\sim\omega^{-2/z} σ ( ω > 0 ) ∼ ω − 2 / z , where z z is the boson dynamical exponent. Leveraging the non-perturbative structure of quantum anomalies, we develop a powerful calculational method for transport. The resulting "anomaly-assisted large N N expansion" allows us to extract the conductivity systematically. Although our results imply that such random-flavor models are problematic as a description of the physical N = 1 N = 1 system, they serve to illustrate some general conditions for quantum critical transport as well as the anomaly-assisted calculational methods. In addition, we revisit an old result that irrelevant operators generate a frequency-dependent conductivity, \sigma(\omega>0) \sim \omega^{-2(z-2)/z} σ ( ω > 0 ) ∼ ω − 2 ( z − 2 ) / z , in problems of this kind. We show explicitly, within the scope of the original calculation, that this result does not hold for any order parameter.
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