Low-Temperature Transport Property of Spin-1/2 Random Heisenberg Chains

Abstract: Quenched disorders can strongly influence the physical properties of quantum many-body systems. The real-space strong-disorder renormalization group (SDRG) analysis has shown that the spin-1/2 random Heisenberg chain is controlled by the infinite-randomness fixed point (IRFP) and forms a random singlet (RS) ground state. Motivated by recent thermal transport experiments on the quasi-one-dimensional antiferromagnet copper benzoate [B. Y. Pan et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 129}, 167201 (2022)], we adapt the SDRG to study the low-temperature properties of the random Heisenberg chain by assuming that its low-energy excited states are captured by the parent Hamiltonian of the RS ground state as well. We find that while the specific heat coefficient and the uniform magnetic susceptibility scale as $C/T\sim T^{-\alpha_{c}}$ and $\chi\sim T^{-\alpha_{s}}$ with $0<\alpha_{c,s}<1$, indicating a divergent low-energy density of states, the thermal and the spin conductivities scale as $\kappa/T\sim T$ and $\sigma_{s}\sim T$, which implies a vanishing density of extended states in the low-energy limit. We believe that such a disparity in the thermodynamic and transport properties is a common feature of random systems controlled by the IRFP.