Heat current rectification in segmented XXZ chains

Abstract: We study the rectification of heat current in an XXZ chain segmented in two parts. We model the effect of the environment with Lindblad heat baths. We show that, in our system, rectification is large for strong interactions in half of the chain and if one bath is at cold enough temperature. For the numerically accessible chain lengths, we observe that the rectification increases with the system size. We gain insight in the rectification mechanism by studying two-time correlations in the steady state. The presence of interactions also induces a strong nonlinear response to the temperature difference, resulting in superlinear and negative differential conductance regimes.