Signatures of Quantum Chaos and fermionization in the incoherent transport of bosonic carriers in the Bose-Hubbard chain

Abstract: We analyse the stationary current of Bose particles across the Bose-Hubbard chain connected to a battery, focusing on the effect of inter-particle interactions. It is shown that the current magnitude drastically decreases as the strength of inter-particle interactions exceeds the critical value which marks the transition to quantum chaos in the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian. We found that this transition is well reflected in the non-equilibrium many-body density matrix of the system. Namely, the level-spacing distribution for eigenvalues of the density matrix changes from Poisson to Wigner-Dyson distributions. With the further increase of the interaction strength, the Wigner-Dyson spectrum statistics changes back to the Poisson statistics which now marks fermionization of the bosonic particles. With respect to the stationary current, this leads to the counter-intuitive dependence of the current magnitude on the particle number.