Physical Review Letters
Quantum Monte Carlo Approach to Elementary Excitations of Antiferromagnetic Heisenberg Chains
Shoji Yamamoto
Abstract
A world-line Monte Carlo approach is proposed to calculate the elementary excitations of quantum systems. The lowest energies as a function of momentum are successfully extracted from an imaginary-time correlation function evaluated at a sufficiently low temperature. The method is applied to the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chains of $S\phantom{\rule{0ex}{0ex}}=\phantom{\rule{0ex}{0ex}}\frac{1}{2},1,\frac{3}{2},$ and $2$ with length up to 64. The spectra for $S\phantom{\rule{0ex}{0ex}}=\phantom{\rule{0ex}{0ex}}\frac{1}{2}$ and 1 coincide well with the result by des Cloizeaux and Pearson and with the result by Takahashi, respectively. The spectra for $S\phantom{\rule{0ex}{0ex}}=\phantom{\rule{0ex}{0ex}}\frac{3}{2}$ and 2 turn out to be massless and massive, respectively. The $S\phantom{\rule{0ex}{0ex}}=\phantom{\rule{0ex}{0ex}}2$ Haldane gap is estimated to be $0.049\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.018$.