Heat transport properties of clean spin ladders coupled to phonons: Umklapp scattering and drag

We study the low-temperature heat transport in clean two-leg spin-ladder compounds coupled to three-dimensional phonons. We argue that the very large heat conductivities observed in such systems can be traced back to the existence of approximate symmetries and corresponding weakly violated conservation laws of the effective (gapful) low-energy model, namely, pseudomomenta. Depending on the ratios of spin gaps and Debye energy and on the temperature, the magnetic contribution to the heat conductivity (κmag) can be positive or negative and can exhibit an activated or antiactivated behavior. In most regimes, κmag is dominated by the spin-phonon drag: the excitations of the two subsystems have almost the same drift velocity, and this allows for an estimate of the ratio κmag∕κₚₕ of the magnetic and phononic contributions to the heat conductivity.