Exponential asymptotic spin correlations in anisotropic spin-1/2 XY chains at finite temperatures

The long-time and long-distance asymptotic behavior of the x spin correlations at finite temperature in an anisotropic spin-1/2 XY chain is determined numerically. The decay of the correlations is exponential in both space and time. Similar exponential decay of correlations was already found earlier in the special case of the isotropic model, where analytical expressions for the decay rates could be derived via a mapping to a different model. While no such mapping is known for the anisotropic model, the asymptotic correlations can be very well approximated by a natural generalization of the known analytic results for the isotropic case.