Heat transport in ordered harmonic lattices

Abstract

We consider heat conduction across an ordered oscillator chain with harmonic interparticle interactions and also onsite harmonic potentials. The onsite spring constant is the same for all sites excepting the boundary sites. The chain is connected to Ohmic heat reservoirs at different temperatures. We use an approach following from a direct solution of the Langevin equations of motion. This works both in the classical and quantum regimes. In the classical case we obtain an exact formula for the heat current in the limit of system size N→∞. In special cases this reduces to earlier results obtained by Rieder, Lebowitz and Lieb and by Nakazawa. We also obtain results for the quantum mechanical case where we study the temperature dependence of the heat current. We briefly discuss results in higher dimensions.