Nonequilibrium spin transport in integrable spin chains: Persistent currents and emergence of magnetic domains

Abstract

The nonequilibrium dynamics of isolated many-body quantum systems leads generically to the emergence of standard thermal ensembles. However, some models, denoted as integrable, can display nontrivial steady states with a large memory of the initial state. This is due to the presence of conserved quantities constraining the unitary dynamics. Here, the authors show that in interacting integrable spin chains there exist also conserved operators that are responsible for ballistic spin transport. Such conserved operators highly influence both the equilibrium and nonequilibrium physics: at equilibrium they are responsible for a nonvanishing spin Drude weight even at half filling, while in the nonequilibrium case they are responsible for out-of-equilibrium steady states characterized by persistent spin currents or dynamically expanding magnetic domains.