Comment on "Anomalous Thermal Conductivity of Frustrated Heisenberg Spin Chains and Ladders"

In a recent letter [Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 156603 (2002); cond-mat/0201300], Alvarez and Gros have numerically analyzed the Drude weight for thermal transport in spin ladders and frustrated chains of up to 14 sites and have proposed that it remains finite in the thermodynamic limit. In this comment, we argue that this conclusion cannot be sustained if the finite-size analysis is taken to larger system sizes.Comment: One page REVTeX4, 1 figure. Published version (minor changes

Bond-impurity induced bound states in disordered spin-1/2 ladders

We discuss the effect of weak bond-disorder in two-leg spin ladders on the dispersion relation of the elementary triplet excitations with a particular focus on the appearance of bound states in the spin gap. Both the cases of modified exchange couplings on the rungs and the legs of the ladder are analyzed. Based on a projection on the single-triplet subspace, the single-impurity and small cluster problems are treated analytically in the strong-coupling limit. Numerically, we study the problem of a single impurity in a spin ladder by exact diagonalization to obtain the low-lying excitations. At finite concentrations and to leading order in the inter-rung coupling, we compare the spectra obtained from numerical diagonalization of large systems within the single-triplet subspace with the results of diagrammatic techniques, namely low-concentration and coherent-potential approximations. The contribution of small impurity clusters to the density of states is also discussed.Comment: 9 pages REVTeX4 including 7 figures, final version; Fig. 5 modifie

Thermal conductivity of anisotropic and frustrated spin-1/2 chains

We analyze the thermal conductivity of anisotropic and frustrated spin-1/2 chains using analytical and numerical techniques. This includes mean-field theory based on the Jordan-Wigner transformation, bosonization, and exact diagonalization of systems with N<=18 sites. We present results for the temperature dependence of the zero-frequency weight of the conductivity for several values of the anisotropy \Delta. In the gapless regime, we show that the mean-field theory compares well to known results and that the low-temperature limit is correctly described by bosonization. In the antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic gapped regime, we analyze the temperature dependence of the thermal conductivity numerically. The convergence of the finite-size data is remarkably good in the ferromagnetic case. Finally, we apply our numerical method and mean-field theory to the frustrated chain where we find a good agreement of these two approaches on finite systems. Our numerical data do not yield evidence for a diverging thermal conductivity in the thermodynamic limit in case of the antiferromagnetic gapped regime of the frustrated chain.Comment: 4 pages REVTeX4 including 6 figures; published version, main modification: added emphasis that the data of our Fig. 3 point to a vanishing of the thermal Drude weight in the thermodynamic limit in this cas

Non-dissipative thermal transport in the massive regimes of the XXZ chain

We present exact results on the thermal conductivity of the one-dimensional spin-1/2 XXZ model in the massive antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic regimes. The thermal Drude weight is calculated by a lattice path integral formulation. Numerical results for wide ranges of temperature and anisotropy as well as analytical results in the low and high temperature limits are presented. At finite temperature, the thermal Drude weight is finite and hence there is non-dissipative thermal transport even in the massive regime. At low temperature, the thermal Drude weight behaves as $D(T)\sim \exp(-\delta/T)/\sqrt{T}$ where $\delta$ is the one-spinon (respectively one-magnon) excitation energy for the antiferromagnetic (respectively ferromagnetic) regime.Comment: 16 page