5 research outputs found
Effects of disorder on two strongly correlated coupled chains
We study the effects of disorder on a system of two coupled chain of strongly
correlated fermions (ladder system), using renormalization group. The stability
of the phases of the pure system is investigated as a function of interactions
both for fermions with spin and spinless fermions. For spinless fermions the
repulsive side is strongly localized whereas the system with attractive
interactions is stable with respect to disorder, at variance with the single
chain case. For fermions with spins, the repulsive side is also localized, and
in particular the d-wave superconducting phase found for the pure system is
totally destroyed by an arbitrarily small amount of disorder. On the other hand
the attractive side is again remarkably stable with respect to localization. We
have also computed the charge stiffness, the localization length and the
temperature dependence of the conductivity for the various phases. In the range
of parameter where d-wave superconductivity would occur for the pure system the
conductivity is found to decrease monotonically with temperature, even at high
temperature, and we discuss this surprising result. For a model with one site
repulsion and nearest neighbor attraction, the most stable phase is an orbital
antiferromagnet . Although this phase has no divergent superconducting
fluctuation it can have a divergent conductivity at low temperature. We argue
based on our results that the superconductivity observed in some two chain
compounds cannot be a simple stabilization of the d-wave phase found for a pure
single ladder. Applications to quantum wires are discussed.Comment: 47 pages, ReVTeX , 8 eps figures submitted to PR
Thermal transport in one-dimensional spin gap systems
We study thermal transport in one dimensional spin systems both in the
presence and absence of impurities. In the absence of disorder, all these spin
systems display a temperature dependent Drude peak in the thermal conductivity.
In gapless systems, the low temperature Drude weight is proportional to
temperature and to the central charge which characterizes the conformal field
theory that describes the system at low energies. On the other hand, the low
temperature Drude weight of spin gap systems shows an activated behavior
modulated by a power law. For temperatures higher than the spin gap, one
recovers the linear T behavior akin to gapless systems. For temperatures larger
than the exchange coupling, the Drude weight decays as 1/T^2. We argue that
this behavior is a generic feature of quasi one dimensional spin gap systems
with a relativistic-like low energy dispersion. We also consider the effect of
a magnetic field on the Drude weight with emphasis on the
commensurate-incommensurate transition induced by it. We then study the effect
of nonmagnetic impurities on the thermal conductivity of the dimerized XY chain
and the spin-1/2 two leg ladder. Impurities destroy the Drude peak and the
thermal conductivity exhibits a purely activated behavior at low temperature,
with an activation gap renormalized by disorder. The relevance of these results
for experiments is briefly discussed.Comment: 13 pages, 6 eps figures, RevTeX