Ballistic heat transport of quantum spin excitations as seen in SrCuO2

Fundamental conservation laws predict ballistic, i.e., dissipationless transport behavior in one-dimensional quantum magnets. Experimental evidence, however, for such anomalous transport has been lacking ever since. Here we provide experimental evidence for ballistic heat transport in a S=1/2 Heisenberg chain. In particular, we investigate high purity samples of the chain cuprate SrCuO2 and observe a huge magnetic heat conductivity kappa(mag). An extremely large spinon mean-free path of more than a micrometer demonstrates that kappa(mag) is only limited by extrinsic scattering processes which is a clear signature of ballistic transport in the underlying spin model.