Understanding the propagation of excitations in quantum spin chains with different kind of interactions

Abstract

The dynamical behaviour of the quantum state of different quantum spin chains, with designed site dependent interaction strengths, is analyzed when the initial state belongs to the one excitation subspace. It is shown that the inhomogeneous chains are able to transfer excitations with near perfect fidelity. This behaviour is found for two very different spin chain Hamiltonians. The first one is the ferromagnetic Heisenberg Hamiltonian with nearest neighbor interactions, the second one describes a chain with long range anisotropic interactions which are ferromagnetic in the $z$ direction and antiferromagnetic in the $(x,y)$ plane. It is shown that both designed chains have in common a partially ordered spectrum and well localized eigenvectors. This physical trait unifies the description of both kind of systems.