Transport properties of a boundary-driven one-dimensional gas of spinless fermions

TL;DR

This paper analytically investigates how boundary-driven oscillating chemical potentials influence transport regimes in a one-dimensional spinless fermion system, revealing tunable transitions between ballistic, anomalous, and insulating behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical framework to understand frequency-dependent transport regimes in boundary-driven spinless fermion chains, highlighting the ability to switch transport types by adjusting driving frequency.

Findings

At zero frequency, current is length-independent, indicating ballistic transport.

At the phase-transition frequency, current decays as n^{-alpha} with alpha 2 or 3.

Below the transition, transport is anomalous with n^{-1/2} scaling; above, it becomes exponentially suppressed.

Abstract

We analytically study a system of spinless fermions driven at the boundary with an oscillating chemical potential. Various transport regimes can be observed: at zero driving frequency the particle current through the system is independent of the system's length; at the phase-transition frequency, being equal to the bandwidth, the current decays as n^{-alpha} with the chain length n, alpha being either 2 or 3; below the transition the scaling of the current is n^{-1/2}, indicating anomalous transport, while it is exponentially small exp{(-n/2xi)} above the transition. Therefore, by a simple change of frequency of the a.c. driving one can vary transport from ballistic, anomalous, to insulating.