Spin-Current Autocorrelations from Single Pure-State Propagation

We demonstrate that the concept of quantum typicality allows for significant progress in the study of realtime spin dynamics and transport in quantum magnets. To this end, we present a numerical analysis of the spin-current autocorrelation function of the antiferromagnetic and anisotropic spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain as inferred from propagating only a single pure state, randomly chosen as a typical representative of the statistical ensemble. Comparing with existing time-dependent density-matrix renormalization group data, we show that typicality is fulfilled extremely well, consistent with an error of our approach, which is perfectly under control and vanishes in the thermodynamic limit. In the long-time limit, our results provide for a new benchmark for the enigmatic spin Drude weight, which we obtain from chains as long as L = 33 sites, i.e., from Hilbert spaces of dimensions almost O(10(4)) larger than in existing exact-diagonalization studies.