Large thermomagnetic effects in weakly disordered Heisenberg chains

The interplay of different scattering mechanisms can lead to novel effects in transport. We show theoretically that the interplay of weak impurity and umklapp scattering in spin-1/2 chains leads to a pronounced dip in the magnetic field dependence of the thermal conductivity κ at a magnetic field B∼T. In sufficiently clean samples the reduction in the magnetic contribution to heat transport can easily become larger than 50%, and the effect is predicted to exist even in samples with a large exchange coupling, J≫B, where the field-induced magnetization is small. Qualitatively, our theory might explain dips at B∼T observed in recent heat transport measurements on copper pyrazine dinitrate, but a fully quantitative description is not possible within our model.