The scaling law of the arrival time of spin systems that present pretty good transmission

Abstract

The pretty good transmission (PGT) scenario implies that the probability of sending one excitation from one extreme of a spin chain to the other can reach values arbitrarily close to the unity just by waiting a time long enough. The conditions that ensure the appearance of this scenario are known for chains with different interactions and lengths. Sufficient conditions for the presence of PGT depend on the spectrum of the Hamiltonian of the spin chain. Some works suggest that the time t ɛ at which the PGT takes place scales as 1 / ( | ϵ | ) f ( N ) , where ɛ is the difference between the probability that a single excitation propagates from one extreme of the chain to the other and the unity, while f(N) is an unknown function of the chain length. In this paper, we show that the exponent is not a simple function of the chain length but a power law of the number of linearly independent irrational eigenvalues of the one-excitation block of the Hamiltonian that enter into the expression of the probability of transmission of one excitation. We explicitly provide examples of a chain showing that the exponent changes when the couplings between the spins change while the length remains fixed. For centrosymmetric spin chains the exponent is at most N / 2 .