Motivated by the rich phase diagrams recently unveiled in frustrated spin-1 chains with competing next-nearest-neighbor and four-spin interactions, we investigate the nature of the elementary excitations of spin-1 chains in the vicinity of phase transitions using the matrix-product state (MPS) representation of elementary excitations. First, we show that both spinons and magnons naturally arise in
SU(2) invariant spin chains when describing ground states and elementary excitations using MPSs. Then we investigate the nature of the elementary excitations across the first-order transition between the Haldane phase and the topologically trivial next-nearest-neighbor Haldane phase. We show explicitly that spinons deconfine at the transition, and we calculate the dispersion of these deconfined spinons with MPSs. We also show that, immediately away from the transition line, spinons confine, forming dispersive spinon/antispinon bound states on both sides of the transition. Finally, we show that deconfined spinons also appear at the transition between the Haldane phase and the spontaneously dimerized phase when this transition is first order.
We study the dynamical structure factor of the frustrated spin-$3/2\phantom{\rule{4pt}{0ex}}{J}_{1}\text{\ensuremath{-}}{J}_{2}$ Heisenberg chains, with particular focus on the partially dimerized phase that emerges between two Kosterlitz-Thouless transitions. Using a valence bond solid Ansatz corroborated by density-matrix renormalization-group simulations, we investigate the nature of magnon and spinon excitations through the single-mode approximation. We show that the magnon develops an incommensurate dispersion at ${J}_{2}\ensuremath{\approx}0.32{J}_{1}$, while the spinons, viewed as domain walls between degenerate valence bond solid states, become incommensurate at ${J}_{2}\ensuremath{\approx}0.4{J}_{1}$ beyond the Lifshitz point $({J}_{2}\ensuremath{\approx}0.388{J}_{1})$. The dynamical structure factor exhibits rich spectral features shaped by the interplay between these excitations, with magnons appearing as resonances embedded in the spinon continuum. The spinon gap shows a nonmonotonic behavior, reaching a peak near the center of the partially dimerized phase and closing at the boundaries, suggesting the appearance of a floating phase as a result of the condensation of incommensurate spinons. Comparative analysis with the spin-
5/2 case confirms the universality of these phenomena across half-integer higher-spin systems. Our results provide detailed insight into how fractionalization and incommensurate condensation govern the spectral properties of frustrated spin chains, offering a unified picture across different spin magnitudes.
We clarified behavior of the excitation gap in a frustrated S=1/2 quantum spin chain with bond dimerization by using the numerical diagonalization of finite systems and a variational approach. The model interpolates between the independent dimer model and the S=1 spin chain by changing a strength of the dimerization. The energy gap is minimum at the fully frustrated point, where a localized kink and a freely mobile antikink govern the low-lying excitations. Away from the point, a kink and an antikink form a bound state by an effective triangular potential between them. They finally collapse to a local triplet at a sufficient value of the dimerization. The wave function of the bound state, the consequential gap enhancement, and the localization length of the bound state were obtained exactly in the continuous limit. The gap enhancement obeys a power law with exponent 2/3. We also obtained the dispersion relation of the local triplet excitation for the entire phase space. The method and the obtained results are common to other frustrated double spin-chain systems, such as the one-dimensional
J1-
J2 model, or the frustrated ladder model.
We investigate the nature of low-energy excitations in a spin chain with antiferrmomagnetic nearest-neighbor
J1, next-nearest-neighbor
J2, and three-site
J3 interactions using the time-dependent density matrix renormalization group and the single mode approximation techniques. In the absence of the
J2 interaction, we identify clear distinctions in the spectral functions in the fully dimerized phase across the exactly dimerized line for different magnitudes of the spins. In contrast to the spin-
1/2 chain, where the spinon continuum dominates the spectral functions, the magnon modes are prominent in the spectral functions of the spin-
1 and spin-
3/2 chains. Through single mode approximation and valence bond solid approaches, we disentangle magnon and spinon contributions to the spectral functions. After including the
J2 interactions, for the spin-
1 chain we trace the evolution of the dynamical structure factor along the phase transition line between the Haldane phase and the fully dimerized phase. We find that the excitation spectrum is a continuum along this line and the spectral gap closes as the order of the transition changes from first order to second order. Along the line of first-order transitions, the spinon-like domain walls are deconfined, and the model exhibits their confinement into discrete bound states away from the transition line. A similar phenomenon occurs in the spin-
3/2 chain across the phase transition between partially dimerized to fully dimerized phases, revealing a universal spinon confinement phenomenon across first-order phase transitions. This study presents the dynamical structure factor corresponding to the ground state phase diagram and establishes a unified quasiparticle framework for understanding the fundamental nature of excitations across distinct quantum phases in frustrated
J1-
J2-
J3 Heisenberg spin chains.
We study the effect of disorder on frustrated dimerized spin-1/2 chains at the Majumdar-Ghosh point. Using variational methods and density-matrix renormalization group approaches, we identify two localization mechanisms for spinons which are the deconfined fractional elementary excitations of these chains. The first one belongs to the Anderson localization class and dominates at the random Majumdar-Ghosh point. There, spinons remain gapped and localize in Lifshitz states whose localization length is analytically obtained. The other mechanism is a random confinement mechanism which induces an effective interaction between spinons and brings the chain into a gapless and partially polarized phase for arbitrarily small disorder.
We study a weakly coupled, frustrated two-leg spin-1/2 Heisenberg ladder. For vanishing coupling between the chains, elementary excitations are deconfined, gapless spin-1/2 objects called spinons. We investigate the fate of spinons for the case of a weak interchain interaction. We show that despite a drastic change in ground state, which becomes spontaneously dimerized, spinons survive as elementary excitations but acquire a spectral gap. We furthermore determine the exact dynamical structure factor for several values of momentum transfer.