Quantum Nonreciprocal Transport at Small Interfaces Weakly-Coupled to Interacting Leads (Dr. Eduardo Mascarenhas)

Time averaging under the Born factorization-hypothesis is shown to lead to the Lindblad form for the steady state of the interface. An extension of Kubo's linear-response to a quantum perturbation with equilibrium Green's functions provides an upper bound for the current which is saturated for short times. We show that baths of interacting spins (XXZ) induce rectification even if the interface between the leads is non-interacting. We also show that a minimal quantum model that allows for spin rectification between non-interacting leads is composed of only two out of tune interacting two-level systems. We bench mark our results with free-particle and matrix-product states techniques whenever possible.