Thermal drag in spin ladders coupled to phonons

We study the spin-phonon drag effect in the magnetothermal transport of spin-1/2 two-leg ladders coupled to lattice degrees of freedom. Using a bond-operator description for the triplon excitations of the spin ladder and magnetoelastic coupling to acoustic phonons, we employ the time convolutionless projection operator method to derive expressions for the diagonal and off-diagonal thermal conductivities of the coupled two-component triplon-phonon system. We find that for magnetoelastic coupling strengths and diagonal scattering rates relevant to copper-oxide spin ladders the drag heat conductivity can be of similar magnitude as the diagonal triplon heat conductivity. Moreover, we show that the drag and diagonal conductivities display very similar overall temperature dependencies. Finally, the drag conductivity is shown to be rather susceptible to external magnetic fields.