Exact ballistic energy transport and emergent XXZ dynamics in an integrable three-state chain

Abstract

We investigate the coupling dependence of ballistic energy transport and the emergent spin dynamics in an integrable Hermitian three-state chain that connects a clock interaction to a highly degenerate flag limit. By constructing a regular $R$-matrix to establish a globally conserved energy current, we analytically evaluate its full variance to obtain the exact, strictly positive leading high-temperature coefficient of the thermal Drude weight and the ballistic growth rate of the energy-correlation second moment. In the strong-coupling limit, the degeneracy is lifted by virtual transitions of a delocalized third-color spectator state, which generates an effective spin-$1/2$ XXZ Hamiltonian with anisotropy $Δ= -1/2$ and fundamentally selects the all-active two-color sector as the true ground state. For periodic boundaries, this virtual spectator motion introduces a positive length-changing XXZ supercharge squared that, for $L\ge4$, strictly annihilates all states within a finite, length-independent energy interval above the ground state. Consequently, we rigorously prove that the full periodic effective theory perfectly replicates the exact low-energy XXZ spectrum, including all state multiplicities, as well as its macroscopic bulk free-energy density.