In the recent literature, there have been discussions of nonlinear spin excitations in one-dimensional, anisotropic Heisenberg spin chains. These have the character of localized excitations, which emerge from the time-dependent classical equations of motion. We show that for a given frequency, in a finite spin chain one has a hierarchy of nonlinear excitations, whose envelopes have the appearance of a one soliton, two soliton,..., states. Also, we consider the nature of these nonlinear excitations in an applied magnetic field of frequency \ensuremath{\omega}, and explore aspects of the transient behavior of the system in response to a time varying external field. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
We study Heisenberg spin-1/2 and spin-1 chains with alternating ferromagnetic (
J1F) and antiferromagnetic (
J1A) nearest-neighbor interactions and ferromagnetic next-nearest-neighbor interaction (
J2F). In this model frustration is induced by the non-zero
J2F and the effect of dimerization is realized by changing the strength of
J1A for a fixed value of
J1F. The model with site spin
s behaves like a Haldane spin chain with site spin 2
s in the limit of vanishing
J2F and large
J1F/J1A. We show that the exact ground state of the model can be found along a line in the parameter space. The phase diagram in the space of
J1A−J2F is determined using numerical techniques complemented by some analytical calculations. A number of quantities, including the ground state spin, energy gap, structure factor, entanglement entropy, and zero temperature magnetization, are studied to understand the complete phase diagram. An interesting and application-wise important feature of this model is that it exhibits a macroscopic magnetization jump in the presence of a magnetic field; we study this using an effective Hamiltonian.
The antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on a chain with nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor couplings is mapped onto the SO(3) nonlinear sigma model in the continuum limit. In one spatial dimension this model is always in its disordered phase and a gap opens to excited states. The latter form a doubly degenerate spin-1 branch at all orders in 1/N. We argue that this feature should be present in the spin-1 Heisenberg model itself. Exact diagonalizations are used to support this claim. The inapplicability of this model to half-integer spin chains is discussed.
Elementary excitations are studied near the Ising limit close to the degenerate point in the one-dimensional anisotropic Heisenberg antiferromagnets with up to next-nearest-neighbor interactions. Solitons in the Néel and (2,2) antiphase states and triplet-dimer excitations in the dimer state are found as propagating modes. These excitations are found to dominate the shape of the central peak in dynamical spin correlation functions, through the comparison with the numerical results by an exact diagonalization method for finite chains. The temperature dependence of the static correlation function is also discussed, and the shape is found to change gradually with increasing temperature, approaching the zero-temperature correlation function at the degenerate point.
We discuss spin-
S antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chains with three-spin interactions, next-nearest-neighbor interactions, and bond alternation. First, we prove rigorously that there exist parameter regions of the exact dimerized ground state in this system. This is a generalization of the Majumdar-Ghosh model to arbitrary
S. Next, we discuss the ground-state phase diagram of the models by introducing several effective field theories and the universality classes of the transitions are described by the level-
2S SU(2) Wess-Zumino-Witten model and the Gaussian model. Finally, we determine the phase diagrams of
S=1 and
S=3/2 systems by using exact diagonalization and level spectroscopy.
The Heisenberg antiferromagnetic spin chain with both dimerization and frustration is studied. The classical ground state has three phases (a Neel phase, a spiral phase and a colinear phase), around which a planar spin-wave analysis is performed. In each phase, we discuss a non-linear sigma model field theory describing the low energy excitations. A renormalization group analysis of the SO(3) matrix-valued field theory of the spiral phase leads to the conclusion that the theory becomes
SO(3)×SO(3) and Lorentz invariant at long distances. This theory is analytically known to have a massive spin-1/2 excitation. We also show that
Z2 solitons in the field theory lead to a double degeneracy in the spectrum for half-integer spins.