Low-temperature transport in Heisenberg chains

Abstract

A technique to determine accurately transport properties of integrable and non-integrable quantum-spin chains at finite temperatures by Quantum Monte-Carlo is presented. The reduction of the Drude weight by interactions in the integrable gapless regime is evaluated. Evidence for the absence of a Drude weight in the gapless regime of a non-integrable system with longer-ranged interactions is presented. We estimate the effect of the non-integrability on the transport properties and compare with recent experiments on one-dimensional quantum-spin chains.