2007/02/28 by Christopher Gaul, H. Büttner, Helmut Büttner · 1 citation
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Thermal Radiation and Cooling Technologies #Thermal properties of materials #cond-mat.stat-mech #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.76.011111
published as Phys. Rev. E 76, 011111 (2007) · 12 pages, 15 figures
arxiv created 2007/07/06 · openalex publication_date 2007/07/17 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We investigate the mechanism of heat conduction in ordered and disordered harmonic one-dimensional chains within the quantum mechanical Langevin method. In the case of disordered chains we find indications for normal heat conduction, which means that there is a finite temperature gradient, but we cannot clearly decide whether the heat resistance increases linearly with the chain length. Furthermore, we observe characteristic quantum mechanical features like the Bose-Einstein statistics of the occupation numbers of the normal modes, freezing of the heat conductivity, and influence of the entanglement within the chain on the current. For the ordered chain we recover some classical results like a vanishing temperature gradient and a heat flux independent of the length of the chain.