  We study spin transport in nonitinerant one-dimensional quantum spin chains.
Motivated by possible applications in spintronics, we consider rectification
effects in both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic systems. We find that the
crucial ingredients in designing a system that displays a nonzero rectification
current are an anisotropy in the exchange interaction of the spin chain
combined with an offset magnetic field. For both ferromagnetic and
antiferromagnetic systems we can exploit the gap in the excitation spectrum
that is created by a bulk anisotropy to obtain a measurable rectification
effect at realistic magnetic fields. For antiferromagnetic systems we also find
that we can achieve a similar effect by introducing a magnetic impurity,
obtained by altering two neighboring bonds in the spin Hamiltonian.
