Thermal transport in one-dimensional spin heterostructures

LILIANA ARRACHEA, GUSTAVO S. LOZANO, AND A. A. ALIGIA

PHYSICAL REVIEW B

AMER PHYSICAL SOC

Año: 2009 vol. 80 p. 144251 - 144259

1098-0121

   We study heat transport in a one-dimensional inhomogeneous quantum spin-1/2 system. It consists of afinite-size XX spin chain coupled at its ends to semi-infinite XX and XY chains at different temperatures, whichplay the role of heat and spin reservoirs. After using the Jordan-Wigner transformation we map the originalspin Hamiltonian into a fermionic Hamiltonian, which contains normal and pairing terms. We find the expres-sions for the heat currents and solve the problem with a nonequilibrium Green’s-function formalism. Weanalyze the behavior of the heat currents as functions of the model parameters. When finite magnetic fields areapplied at the two reservoirs, the system exhibits rectifying effects in the heat flow.