Bethe-Boltzmann Hydrodynamics and Spin Transport in the XXZ Chain

Vir B. Bulchandani, Romain Vasseur, Christoph Karrasch, Joel E. Moore

Published 2017-02-20Version 1

Quantum integrable systems, such as the interacting Bose gas in one dimension and the XXZ quantum spin chain, have an extensive number of local conserved quantities that endow them with exotic thermalization and transport properties. We review recently introduced hydrodynamic approaches for such integrable systems in detail and extend them to finite times and arbitrary initial conditions. We then discuss how such methods can be applied to describe non-equilibrium steady states involving ballistic heat and spin currents. In particular, we show that the spin Drude weight in the XXZ chain, previously accessible only by heuristic Bethe ansatz techniques, may be evaluated from hydrodynamics in very good agreement with density-matrix renormalization group calculations. This agreement is a strong check on the equivalence between the generalized hydrodynamics resulting from the infinite set of conservation laws in this model on the one hand, and the Bethe-Boltzmann equation in terms of the pseudo-momentum distribution on the other.