Allosteric impurity effects in long spin chains

Abstract

Allosterism traditionally refers to local changes in an extended object, for instance the binding of a ligand to a macromolecule, leading to a localized response at some other, possibly quite remote position. Here, we show that such fascinating effects may already occur in very simple and common quantum many-body systems, such as an anisotropic Heisenberg spin chain: Introducing an impurity at one end of a sufficiently long chain may lead to quite significant changes of the observable behavior near the other end, but not in the much larger region in between. Specifically, spin autocorrelation functions at thermal equilibrium are found to exhibit a pronounced allosterism of this type.