Low Temperature Transport Properties of Strongly Interacting Systems- Thermal Conductivity of Spin-1/2 Chains

We outline a general approach to the computation of transport properties of interacting systems at low temperetures and frequencies. We show that if the fixed point and the irrelevant operators around it are known, then by studying the structure of the softly violated conserved currents chracterizing the fixed point one may set up an effective calculation in terms of a memory matrix formalism. We apply this approach to the computation of thermal conductivity of spin chains embedded in a matter matrix and interacting with its phonons. The results are found to be in very good agreement with experiment.Comment: 6 pages, 6 colored figures; to appear in the proceedings of "Highlights in CMP", May 2003, Salerno, Ital