Through an exact analysis using quantum Langevin dynamics, we demonstrate the crossover from ballistic to diffusive thermal transport in a harmonic chain with each site connected to Ohmic heat reservoirs. The temperatures of the two heat baths at the boundaries are specified from before whereas the temperatures of the interior heat reservoirs are determined self-consistently by demanding that in the steady state, on average, there is no heat current between any such (self-consistent) reservoir and the harmonic chain. Essence of our study is that the effective mean free path separating the ballistic regime of transport from the diffusive one emerges naturally.
There has been much interest in semiconductor superlattices because of showing very low thermal conductivities. This makes them especially suitable for applications in a variety of devices for thermoelectric generation of energy, heat control at the nanometric length scale, etc. Recent experiments have confirmed that the effective thermal conductivity of superlattices at room temperature have a minimum for very short periods (in the order of nanometers) as some kinetic calculations had anticipated previously. This work will show advances on a thermodynamic theory of heat transport in nanometri…
This paper further discusses the tempered fractional Brownian motion, its ergodicity, and the derivation of the corresponding Fokker-Planck equation. Then we introduce the generalized Langevin equation with the tempered fractional Gaussian noise for a free particle, called tempered fractional Langevin equation (tfLe). While the tempered fractional Brownian motion displays localization diffusion for the long time limit and for the short time its mean squared displacement has the asymptotic form $t^{2H}$, we show that the asymptotic form of the mean squared displacement of the tfLe transits from…
Several low-dimensional systems show a crossover from diffusive to ballistic heat transport when system size is decreased. Although there is some phenomenological understanding of this crossover phenomena in the coarse grained level, a microscopic picture that consistently describes both the ballistic and the diffusive transport regimes has been lacking. In this work we derive a scaling from for the thermal current in a class of one dimensional systems attached to heat baths at boundaries, and show rigorously that the crossover occurs when the characteristic length scale of the system competes…
We discuss a simple deterministic lattice gas of locally interacting charged particles, for which we show coexistence of ballistic and diffusive transport. Both, the ballistic and the diffusive transport coefficients, specifically the Drude weight and the diffusion constant, respectively, are analytically computed for particular set of generalised Gibbs states and may independently vanish for appropriate values of thermodynamic parameters. Moreover, our analysis, based on explicit construction of the matrix representation of time-automorphism in a suitable basis of the algebra of local observa…
The transition between ballistic and diffusive motion poses difficult problems in several fields of physics. In this work we show how to calculate the spectra of the correlation functions between fields of arbitrary spatial dependence as seen by particles moving through the fields in regions bounded by specularly reflecting walls valid for diffusive and ballistic motion as well as the transition region in between for motion in 2 and 3 dimensions. Applications to relaxation in nmr are discussed.
We study the ballistic-to-diffusive transition induced by the weak breaking of integrability in a boundary-driven XXZ spin-chain. Studying the evolution of the spin current density $\mathcal J^s$ as a function of the system size $L$, we show that, accounting for boundary effects, the transition has a non-trivial universal behavior close to the XX limit. It is controlled by the scattering length $L^*\propto V^{-2}$, where $V$ is the strength of the integrability breaking term. In the XXZ model, the interplay of interactions controls the emergence of a transient "quasi-ballistic" regime at lengt…
The transport of excitation probabilities amongst weakly coupled subunits is investigated for a class of finite quantum systems. It is demonstrated that the dynamical behavior of the transported quantity depends on the considered length scale, e. g., the introduced distinction between diffusive and ballistic transport appears to be a scale-dependent concept, especially since a transition from diffusive to ballistic behavior is found in the limit of small as well as in the limit of large length scales. All these results are derived by an application of the time-convolutionless projection operat…
We study the evolution of a system of free fermions in one dimension under the simultaneous effects of coherent tunneling and stochastic Markovian noise. We identify a class of noise terms where a hierarchy of decoupled equations for the correlation functions emerges. In the special case of incoherent, nearest-neighbour hopping the equation for the two-point functions is solved explicitly. The Green's function for the particle density is obtained analytically and a timescale is identified where a crossover from ballistic to diffusive behaviour takes place. The result can be interpreted as a co…
Brownian motion is ballistic on short time scales and diffusive on long time scales. Our theoretical investigations indicate that one can observe the exact opposite - an "anomaleous diffusion process" where initially diffusive motion becomes ballistic on longer time scales - in an ultracold atom system with a size comparable to macromolecules. This system is a quantum matter-wave bright soliton subject to decoherence via three-particle losses for which we investigate the center-of-mass motion. Our simulations show that such unusual center-of-mass dynamics should be observable on experimentally…
This paper presents an analytical study of the coexistence of different transport regimes in quasi-one-dimensional surface-disordered waveguides (or electron conductors). To elucidate main features of surface scattering, the case of two open modes (channels) is considered in great detail. Main attention is paid to the transmission in dependence on various parameters of the model with two types of rough-surface profiles (symmetric and antisymmetric). It is shown that depending on the symmetry, basic mechanisms of scattering can be either enhanced or suppressed. As a consequence, different trans…
We show that particle transport in a uniform, quantum multi-baker map, is generically ballistic in the long time limit, for any fixed value of Planck's constant. However, for fixed times, the semi-classical limit leads to diffusion. Random matrix theory provides explicit analytical predictions for the mean square displacement of a particle in the system. These results exhibit a crossover from diffusive to ballistic motion, with crossover time from diffusive to ballistic motion on the order of the inverse of Planck's constant. We can argue, that for a large class of 1D quantum random walks, sim…
The unified description of diffusion processes that cross over from a ballistic behavior at short times to normal or anomalous diffusion (sub- or superdiffusion) at longer times is constructed on the basis of a non-Markovian generalization of the Fokker-Planck equation. The necessary non-Markovian kinetic coefficients are determined by the observable quantities (mean- and mean square displacements). Solutions of the non-Markovian equation describing diffusive processes in the physical space are obtained. For long times, these solutions agree with the predictions of the continuous random walk t…
We study the time evolution of the entanglement entropy of a one-dimensional nonintegrable spin chain, starting from random nonentangled initial pure states. We use exact diagonalization of a nonintegrable quantum Ising chain with transverse and longitudinal fields to obtain the exact quantum dynamics. We show that the entanglement entropy increases linearly with time before finite-size saturation begins, demonstrating a ballistic spreading of the entanglement, while the energy transport in the same system is diffusive. Thus we explicitly demonstrate that the spreading of entanglement is much …
The conditional mutual information (CMI) $\mathcal{I}(A\! : \! C|B)$ quantifies the amount of correlations shared between $A$ and $C$ \emph{given} $B$. It therefore functions as a more general quantifier of bipartite correlations in multipartite scenarios, playing an important role in the theory of quantum Markov chains. In this paper we carry out a detailed study on the behavior of the CMI in non-equilibrium steady-states (NESS) of a quantum chain placed between two baths at different temperatures. These results are used to shed light on the mechanisms behind ballistic and diffusive transport…
We explore the non-equilibrium dynamics of non-interacting classical particles in a one-dimensional driven superlattice which is composed of domains exposed to different time-dependent forces. It is shown how the combination of directed transport and conversion processes from diffusive to ballistic motion causes strong correlations between velocity and phase for particles passing through a superlattice. A detailed understanding of the underlying mechanism allows us to tune the resulting velocity distributions at distinguished points in the superlattice by means of local variations of the appli…
The idea that the dynamics of a spin is determined by the size of its neighbouring domains was recently introduced (S. Biswas and P. Sen, Phys. Rev. E {\bf 80}, 027101 (2009)) in a Ising spin model (henceforth, referred to as model I). A parameter $p$ is now defined to modify the dynamics such that a spin can sense domain sizes up to $R = pL/2$ in a one dimensional system of size $L$. For the cutoff factor $p$ \to 0$, the dynamics is Ising like and the domains grow with time $t$ diffusively as $ t^{1/z}$ with $z=2$, while for $p=1$, the original model I showed ballistic dynamics with $z \simeq…
Motivated by thermal conductivity experiments in spin chain compounds, we propose a phenomenological model to account for a ballistic magnetic transport coupled to a diffusive phononic one, along the line of the seminal two-temperature diffusive transport Sanders-Walton model. Although the expression for the effective thermal conductivity is identical to that of Sanders-Walton, the interpretation is entirely different, as the "magnetic conductivity" is replaced by an "effective transfer conductivity" between the magnetic and phononic component. This model also reveals the fascinating possibili…
Continuous time random walks and Langevin equations are two classes of stochastic models for describing the dynamics of particles in the natural world. While some of the processes can be conveniently characterized by both of them, more often one model has significant advantages (or has to be used) compared with the other one. In this paper, we consider the weakly damped Langevin system coupled with a new subordinator|$α$-dependent subordinator with $1<α<2$. We pay attention to the diffusion behaviour of the stochastic process described by this coupled Langevin system, and find the super-ballis…
Memory effects, sometimes, can not be neglected. In the framework of continuous time random walk, memory effect is modeled by the correlated waiting times. In this paper, we derive the two-point probability distribution of the stochastic process with correlated increments as well as the one of its inverse process, and present the Langevin description of Lévy walk with memory, i.e., correlated waiting times. Based on the built Langevin picture, the properties of aging and nonstationary are discussed. The Langevin system exhibits sub-ballistic superdiffusion if the friction force is involved, wh…
The behavior of a spin undergoing Larmor precession in the presence of fluctuating fields is of interest to workers in many fields. The fluctuating fields cause frequency shifts and relaxation which are related to their power spectrum, which can be determined by taking the Fourier transform of the auto-correlation functions of the field fluctuations. Recently we have shown how to calculate these correlation functions for all values of mean free path (ballistic to diffusive motion) in finite bounded regions, using the model of persistent continuous time random walks (CTRW) for particles subject…
We use a Generalised Langevin Equation (GLE) scheme to study the thermal transport of low dimensional systems. In this approach, the central classical region is connected to two realistic thermal baths kept at two different temperatures [H. Ness et al., Phys. Rev. B {\bf 93}, 174303 (2016)]. We consider model Al systems, i.e. one-dimensional atomic chains connected to three-dimensional baths. The thermal transport properties are studied as a function of the chain length $N$ and the temperature difference $ΔT$ between the baths. We calculate the transport properties both in the linear response …
We investigate the motility of a growing population of cells in a idealized setting: we consider a system of hard disks in which new particles are added according to prescribed growth kinetics, thereby dynamically changing the number density. As a result, the expected Brownian motion of the hard disks is modified. We compute the density-dependent friction of the hard disks and insert it in an effective Langevin equation to describe the system, assuming that the inter-collision time is smaller than the timescale of the growth. We find that the effective Langevin description captures the changes…
We show that a one-dimensional ordered fermionic lattice system with power-law-decaying hopping, when connected to two baths at its two ends with different chemical potentials at zero temperature, features two phases showing sub-diffusive scaling of conductance with system size. These phases have no analogues in the isolated system (i.e, in absence of the baths) where the transport is perfectly ballistic. In the open system scenario, interestingly, there occurs two chemical-potential-driven sub-diffusive to ballistic phase transitions at zero temperature. We discuss how these phase transitions…
A thermal colloid suspended in a liquid will transition from a short time ballistic motion to a long time diffusive motion. However, the transition between ballistic and diffusive motion is highly dependent on the properties and structure of the particular liquid. We directly observe a free floating tracer particle's ballistic motion and its transition to the long time regime in both a Newtonian fluid and a viscoelastic Maxwell fluid. We examine the motion of the free particle in a Newtonian fluid and demonstrate a high degree of agreement with the accepted Clercx-Schram model for motion in a …
We study the dynamics of Brownian particles in a heterogeneous one-dimensional medium with a spatially-dependent diffusion coefficient of the form $D(x)\sim |x|^c$, at constant temperature. The particle's probability distribution function (PDF) is calculated both analytically, by solving Fick's diffusion equation, and from numerical simulations of the underdamped Langevin equation. At large times, the PDFs calculated by both approaches yield identical results, corresponding to subdiffusion for $c<0$, and superdiffusion for $0<c<1$. For $c>1$, the diffusion equation predicts that the particles …
We derive an expression for the mean square displacement of a particle whose motion is governed by a uniform, periodic, quantum multi-baker map. The expression is a function of both time, $t$, and Planck's constant, $\hbar$, and allows a study of both the long time, $t\to\infty$, and semi-classical, $\hbar\to 0$, limits taken in either order. We evaluate the expression using random matrix theory as well as numerically, and observe good agreement between both sets of results. The long time limit shows that particle transport is generically ballistic, for any fixed value of Planck's constant. Ho…
In this work we study the asymmetric heat flow, i.e., thermal rectification, of a one-dimensional, mass-graded system consisting of acoupled harmonic oscillator lattice (ballistic spacer) and two diffusive leads attached to the boundaries of the former with both nearest-neighbor and next-nearest-neighbor (NNN) interactions. The latter enhance the rectification properties of the system and specially its independence on system size. The system presents a maximum rectification efficiency for a very precise value of the parameter that controls the coupling strength of the NNN interactions that dep…
For reproducing the anomalous -- i.e., sub- or super-diffusive -- behavior in some stochastic dynamical systems, the Generalized Langevin Equation (GLE) has gained considerable popularity in recent years. Motivated by the question whether or not a system with anomalous dynamics can have the GLE formulation, here I consider polymer physics, where sub-diffusive behavior is commonplace. I provide an exact derivation of the GLE for phantom Rouse polymers, andby identifying polymeric response to local strains, I argue the case for the GLE formulation for self-avoiding polymers and polymer transloca…
Extending a Boltzmann-Langevin theory to magnons, we show a universality of current-noise suppression in diffusive systems against the difference of quantum-statistical properties of bosons and fermions. To this end, starting from a quantum kinetic equation for magnons subjected to thermal gradient in dilute impurities, we derive a bosonic counterpart of the semiclassical Boltzmann-Langevin equation for electrons and evaluate a magnonic current-noise in the diffusive insulating magnet. We theoretically discover that compared with a Poissonian shot noise of magnons in an insulating ferromagneti…
We present results on the ballistic and diffusive behavior of the Langevin dynamics in a periodic potential that is driven away from equilibrium by a space-time periodic driving force, extending some of the results obtained by Collet and Martinez. In the hyperbolic scaling, a nontrivial average velocity can be observed even if the external forcing vanishes in average. More surprisingly, an average velocity in the direction opposite to the forcing may develop at the linear response level -- a phenomenon called negative mobility. The diffusive limit of the non-equilibrium Langevin dynamics is al…
The Langevin equation includes a random force to maintain equilibrium and prevent friction from bringing motion to a standstill; but for ballistic motion, the random force is often neglected. Here, we use the Langevin equation for molecular dynamics simulations of 2.76 eV H-atoms experiencing electronic friction in collisions with 300 K metals, where a random force arises from thermal electron-hole pairs. Simulations without the random force fail dramatically to reproduce experiment, although the incidence energy is much larger than $k_\text{B}T$. We analyze the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process to s…
The dynamic properties of a classical tracer particle in a random, disordered medium are investigated close to the localization transition. For Lorentz models obeying Newtonian and diffusive motion at the microscale, we have performed large-scale computer simulations, demonstrating that universality holds at long times in the immediate vicinity of the transition. The scaling function describing the crossover from anomalous transport to diffusive motion is found to vary extremely slowly and spans at least 5 decades in time. To extract the scaling function, one has to allow for the leading unive…
We present a numerical study on the spin and thermal conductivities of the spin-1 Heisenberg chain in the high temperature limit, in particular of the Drude weight contribution and frequency dependence. We use the Exact Diagonalization and the recently developed microcanonical Lanczos method; it allows us a finite size scaling analysis by the study of significantly larger lattices. This work, pointing to a diffusive rather than ballistic behavior is discussed with respect to other recent theoretical and experimental studies.
We analyze transport of local magnetization and develop schemes to control transport behavior in finite spin-1/2 Heisenberg chains and spin-1/2 Heisenberg two-leg ladders at zero temperature. By adjusting parameters in the Hamiltonians, these quantum systems may show both integrable and chaotic limits. We provide examples of chaotic systems leading to diffusive and to ballistic transport. In addition, methods of coherent quantum control to induce a transition from diffusive to ballistic transport are proposed.
We study the nonequilibrium dynamics of random spin chains that remain integrable (i.e., solvable via Bethe ansatz): because of correlations in the disorder, these systems escape localization and feature ballistically spreading quasiparticles. We derive a generalized hydrodynamic theory for dynamics in such random integrable systems, including diffusive corrections due to disorder, and use it to study non-equilibrium energy and spin transport. We show that diffusive corrections to the ballistic propagation of quasiparticles can arise even in noninteracting settings, in sharp contrast with clea…
