We consider an open isotropic Heisenberg quantum spin chain, coupled at the ends to boundary reservoirs polarized in different directions, which sets up a twisting gradient across the chain. Using a matrix product ansatz, we calculate the exact magne
tization profiles and magnetization currents in the nonequilibrium steady steady state of a chain with N sites. The magnetization profiles are harmonic functions with a frequency proportional to the twisting angle {theta}. The currents of the magnetization components lying in the twisting plane and in the orthogonal direction behave qualitatively differently: In-plane steady state currents scale as 1/N^2 for fixed and sufficiently large boundary coupling, and vanish as the coupling increases, while the transversal current increases with the coupling and saturates to 2{theta}/N.
We demonstrate that the exact non-equilibrium steady state of the one-dimensional Heisenberg XXZ spin chain driven by boundary Lindblad operators can be constructed explicitly with a matrix product ansatz for the non-equilibrium density matrix where
the matrices satisfy a {it quadratic algebra}. This algebra turns out to be related to the quantum algebra $U_q[SU(2)]$. Coherent state techniques are introduced for the exact solution of the isotropic Heisenberg chain with and without quantum boundary fields and Lindblad terms that correspond to two different completely polarized boundary states. We show that this boundary twist leads to non-vanishing stationary currents of all spin components. Our results suggest that the matrix product ansatz can be extended to more general quantum systems kept far from equilibrium by Lindblad boundary terms.
