Spin transport of weakly disordered Heisenberg chain at infinite temperature

Abstract

We study the disordered Heisenberg spin chain, which exhibits many-body localization at strong disorder, in the weak to moderate disorder regime. A continued fraction calculation of dynamical correlations is devised, using a variational extrapolation of recurrents. Good convergence for the infinite chain limit is shown. We find that the local spin correlations decay at long times as $C\ensuremath{\sim}{t}^{\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\beta}}$, whereas the conductivity exhibits a low-frequency power law $\ensuremath{\sigma}\ensuremath{\sim}{\ensuremath{\omega}}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$. The exponents depict subdiffusive behavior $\ensuremath{\beta}<1/2,\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\alpha}>0$ at all finite disorders and convergence to the scaling result $\ensuremath{\alpha}+2\ensuremath{\beta}=1$ at large disorders.