Dissipative dynamics of an extended magnetic nanostructure: Spin necklace in a metallic environment

Abstract

We study theoretically the dynamics of an ``xxz'' spin necklace coupled to a conduction electron sea, a model system for a nanostructure in a dissipative environment. We extract the long-time behavior via a mapping to a multichannel Coulomb gas problem followed by a scaling analysis. The strong quantum fluctuations of the necklace cause a nontrivial dependence of couplings on system size which we extract via an analysis involving the ``boundary condition changing operator'', and confirm via a detailed numerical evaluation of one case.