Energy transport in disordered classical spin chains

Abstract

We present a numerical study of the diffusion of energy at high temperature in strongly disordered chains of interacting classical spins evolving deterministically. We find that quenched randomness strongly suppresses transport with the diffusion constant becoming reduced by several orders of magnitude upon the introduction of moderate disorder. We have also looked for but not found signs of a classical many-body localization transition at any nonzero strength of the spin-spin interactions.