Parametrically Long Lifetime of Superdiffusion in Nonintegrable Spin Chains

Abstract

Superdiffusion is surprisingly easily observed even in systems without the integrability underpinning this phenomenon. Indeed, the classical Heisenberg chain—one of the simplest many-body systems, and firmly believed to be nonintegrable—evinces a long-lived regime of anomalous, superdiffusive spin dynamics at finite temperature. Similarly, superdiffusion persists for long timescales, even at high temperature, for small perturbations around a related integrable model. Eventually, however, ordinary diffusion is believed to be asymptotically restored. We examine the timescales governing the lifetime of the superdiffusive regime, and argue that it diverges algebraically fast—both in deviation from the integrable limit, and at low temperature, where we find t*∼T−ζ with an exponent possibly as large as ζ=8. This can render the crossover to ordinary diffusion practically inaccessible. Published by the American Physical Society 2024