Behavior of magnetic currents in anisotropic Heisenberg spin chains out of equilibrium

The behavior of the magnetic currents in one-dimensional Heisenberg XXZ spin chains kept out of equilibrium by boundary driving fields is investigated. In particular, the dependence of the spin currents on the anisotropy parameter Δ and on the boundary fields is studied both analytically and numerically in the framework of the Lindblad master equation formalism. We show that the spin current can be maximized with appropriate choices of the boundary fields, and for odd system sizes, N, we demonstrate the existence of additional symmetries that cause the current to be an odd function of Δ. From direct numerical integrations of the quantum master equation, we find that for an arbitrary N the current J(z)(N) vanishes for Δ=0, while for Δ negative it alternates its sign with the system size. In the gapless critical region |Δ|<1, the scaling of the current is shown to be J(z)(N)∼1/N while in the gapped region |Δ|>1 we find that J(z)(N)∼exp(-αN). A simple mean-field approach, which predicts rather well the values of J(z)(N) for the gapped region and the values of the absolute current maxima in the critical region, is developed. The existence of two different stationary solutions for the mean-field density matrix in the whole parameter range is also demonstrated.