The natural explanation of the excitation spectrum of the spin-1 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain is given from the viewpoint of the spin-1/2 ferromagnetic-antiferromagnetic alternating Heisenberg chain. The energy spectrum of the latter is calculated with fixed momentum k by numerical diagonalization of finite size systems. It consists of a branch of propagating triplet pair (triplet wave) and the continuum of multiple triplet waves for weak ferromagnetic coupling. As the ferromagnetic coupling increases, the triplet wave branch is absorbed in the continuum for small k, reproducing the characteristics of the spin-1 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain.
The natural explanation of the excitation spectrum of the spin-1 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain is given from the viewpoint of the spin-1/2 ferromagnetic-antiferromagnetic alternating Heisenberg chain. The energy spectrum of the latter is calculated with fixed momentum
k by numerical diagonalization of finite size systems. It consists of a branch of propagating triplet pair (triplet wave) and the continuum of multiple triplet waves for weak ferromagnetic coupling. As the ferromagnetic coupling increases, the triplet wave branch is absorbed in the continuum for small
k, reproducing the characteristics of the spin-1 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain.
According to Haldane’s conjecture, there is a spin gap of the excitation spectrum in integer Heisenberg spin chains whereas half-integer spin chains have a gapless excitation spectrum. In an earlier publication (Hung and Gong 2005 Phys. Rev. B 71 054413), the Haldane gap and other properties of the spin-1 system are explained using a spin-1/2 alternating bond chain model. The ferromagnetic–ferromagnetic–antiferromagnetic Heisenberg spin-1/2 chain is expected to behave similarly to the uniform spin-3/2 Heisenberg chain for strong ferromagnetic coupling. And the general nonuniform spin-1/2 chain may be used to explain the properties of the integer and half-integer high spin- S chains, consistently. In this paper, we provide a detailed numerical verification for the above problems.