Low-Temperature Transport in Heisenberg Chains

Abstract

A technique to determine accurately transport properties of integrable and nonintegrable quantum-spin chains at finite temperatures by quantum Monte Carlo is presented. The reduction of the Drude weight by interactions in the integrable gapless regime is evaluated. Evidence for the absence of Drude weight in the gapless regime of a nonintegrable system with longer-ranged interactions is presented. We estimate the effect of the nonintegrability on the transport properties and compare with recent experiments on one-dimensional quantum-spin chains.