A Lieb-Robinson bound for quantum spin chains with strong on-site impurities

Abstract

We consider a quantum spin chain with nearest neighbor interactions and sparsely distributed on-site impurities. We prove commutator bounds for its Heisenberg dynamics which incorporate the coupling strengths of the impurities. The impurities are assumed to satisfy a minimum spacing, and each impurity has a non-degenerate spectrum. Our results are proven in a broadly applicable setting, both in finite volume and in thermodynamic limit. We apply our results to improve Lieb-Robinson bounds for the Heisenberg spin chain with a random, sparse transverse field drawn from a heavy-tailed distribution.