Nonequilibrium thermal transport and its relation to linear response

Understand

We study the real-time dynamics of spin chains driven out of thermal equilibrium by an initial temperature gradient T_L \neq T_R using density matrix renormalization group methods.

• We demonstrate that the nonequilibrium energy current saturates fast to a finite value if the linear-response thermal conductivity is infinite, i.e.
• if the Drude weight D is nonzero.
• Our data suggests that a nonintegrable dimerized chain might support such dissipationless transport (D>0).