Understanding the propagation of excitations in quantum spin chains with different kind of interactions

Abstract

The dynamical behavior of the quantum state of different quantum spin chains, with designed site-dependent interaction strengths, is analyzed when the initial state belongs to the one excitation subspace. Our results show that the inhomogeneous chains transfer single excitations with near-perfect fidelity for two different spin chain Hamiltonians. The first one is the ferromagnetic Heisenberg Hamiltonian with nearest neighbor interactions. The second spin chain has long-range anisotropic interactions, ferromagnetic in one direction and antiferromagnetic in the orthogonal plane. Both designed chains have in common a partially ordered spectrum and well-localized eigenvectors. This physical trait unifies the description of both kinds of systems.