Classifying transport behavior via current fluctuations in open quantum systems

Abstract

There are two standard ways of classifying transport behavior of systems. The first is via time scaling of spread of correlations in the isolated system in thermodynamic limit. The second is via system size scaling of conductance in the steady state of the open system. We show here that these correspond to taking the thermodynamic limit and the long time limit of the integrated equilibrium current–current correlations of the open system in different order. In general, the limits may not commute leading to a conflict between the two standard ways of transport classification. Nevertheless, the full information is contained in the equilibrium current–current correlations of the open system. We show this analytically by rigorously deriving the open-system current fluctuation dissipation relations starting from an extremely general open quantum set-up and then carefully taking the proper limits. We test our theory numerically on the non-trivial example of the critical Aubry–André–Harper model, where, it has been recently shown that, the two standard classifications indeed give different results. We find that both the total current autocorrelation and the long-range local current correlations of the open system in equilibrium show signatures of diffusive transport up to a time scale. This time scale grows as square of system size. Beyond this time scale a steady state value is reached. The steady state value is conductance, which shows sub-diffusive scaling with system size.