Environment-assisted quantum transport and mobility edges

TL;DR

This study explores how a single-particle mobility edge in a one-dimensional quantum system can significantly enhance environment-assisted quantum transport, revealing complex dependencies on disorder and localized states.

Contribution

It demonstrates that a mobility edge can generate strong ENAQT, a novel insight into quantum transport in disordered systems.

Findings

ENAQT increases significantly with the presence of a mobility edge.

The enhancement depends nonmonotonically on disorder strength and localized states.

Cooperation between population uniformization and localization drives the ENAQT enhancement.

Abstract

Environment-assisted quantum transport (ENAQT) is a unique situation where environmental noise can, counterintuitively, enhance the transport of an open quantum system. In this paper, we investigate how the presence of a one-dimensional single-particle mobility edge can generate strong ENAQT. For this purpose, we study the energy current of a generalized Aubry-Andr\'e-Harper (AAH) tight binding model coupled at its edges to spin baths of differing temperature and dephasing noise along the system. We find that the ENAQT increases by orders of magnitude and depends on the number of localized eigenstates and disorder strength nonmonotonically. We show that this enhancement is the result of the cooperation between population uniformization and localization.