Particle and thermal transport through one dimensional topological systems via Lindblad formalism

Yan He, Chih-Chun Chien

Published 2022-10-09Version 1

We apply the Lindblad quantum master equation to two examples of one-dimensional topological systems, the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model and Kitaev chain, to study their particle and thermal transport. The steady-state properties are obtained by decomposing fermions into Majorana fermions and extracting their correlation functions. We focus on the particle and thermal currents flowing through the bulk when the system is driven by two reservoirs coupled to the two ends. The ratio of the currents of the SSH model from the topological and trivial regimes with the same bandwidth demonstrates suppression of transport due to the edge states, which couple to the reservoirs but do not participate in transport. A similar comparison cannot be performed for the Kitaev chain because the topological and trivial regimes have different bandwidths, and the edge states are less significant away from the transition. Therefore, the results contrast various topological properties in quantum transport.