Heat transport in the XXZ spin chain: from ballistic to diffusive regimes and dephasing enhancement

In this work we study the heat transport in an XXZ spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain with homogeneous magnetic field, incoherently driven out of equilibrium by reservoirs at the boundaries. We focus on the effect of bulk dephasing (energy-dissipative) processes in different parameter regimes of the system. The non-equilibrium steady state of the chain is obtained by simulating its evolution under the corresponding Lindblad master equation, using the time evolving block decimation method. In the absence of dephasing, the heat transport is ballistic for weak interactions, while being diffusive in the strongly interacting regime, as evidenced by the heat current scaling with the system size. When bulk dephasing takes place in the system, diffusive transport is induced in the weakly interacting regime, with the heat current monotonically decreasing with the dephasing rate. In contrast, in the strongly interacting regime, the heat current can be significantly enhanced by dephasing for systems of small size. © 2013 IOP Publishing Ltd and SISSA Medialab srl