The properties of antiferromagnetic Heisenberg S= 1/2 ladders with two, three and four chains are expanded in the ratio of the intrachain and interchain coupling constants. A simple mapping procedure is introduced to relate the four- and two-chain ladders, which keeps to moderate values of the expansion parameters. A second-order calculation of the spin gap to the lowest triplet excitation in the two- and four-chain ladders is found to be quite accurate, even at the isotropic point where the couplings are equal. Similar expansions and mapping procedures are presented for the three-chain ladders, which are in the same universality class as single chains.
An antiferromagnetic spin chain is equivalent to the two-flavour massless Schwinger model in a uniform background charge density in the strong coupling regime. The gapless mode of the spin chain is represented by a massless boson of the Schwinger model. In a two-leg spin ladder system the massless boson aquires a finite mass due to inter-chain interactions. The gap energy is found to be about when the inter-chain Heisenberg coupling is small compared with the intra-chain Heisenberg coupling. It is also shown that a cyclically symmetric -leg ladder system is gapless or gapful for an odd or even , respectively.
Heisenberg antiferromagnetic spin ``ladders'' (two coupled spin chains) are low-dimensional magnetic systems which for S=1/2 interpolate between half-integer-spin chains, when the chains are decoupled, and effective integer-spin one-dimensional chains in the strong-coupling limit. The spin-1/2 ladder may be realized in nature by vanadyl pyrophosphate, (VO
)2P2O7. In this paper we apply strong-coupling perturbation theory, spin-wave theory, Lanczos techniques, and a Monte Carlo method to determine the ground-state energy and the low-lying excitation spectrum of the ladder. We find evidence of a nonzero spin gap for all interchain couplings ${\mathit{J}}_{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\perp}}}$>0. A band of spin-triplet excitations above the gap is also analyzed. These excitations are unusual for an antiferromagnet, since their long-wavelength dispersion relation behaves as (k-
k0)2 (in the strong-coupling limit ${\mathit{J}}_{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\perp}}}$\ensuremath{\gg}J, where J is the in-chain antiferromagnetic coupling). Their band is folded, with a minimum energy at
k0=\ensuremath{\pi}, and a maximum between
k1=\ensuremath{\pi}/2 (for ${\mathit{J}}_{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\perp}}}$=0) and 0 (for ${\mathit{J}}_{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\perp}}}$=\ensuremath{\infty}). We also give numerical results for the dynamical structure factor S(q,\ensuremath{\omega}), which can be determined in neutron scattering experiments. Finally, possible experimental techniques for studying the excitation spectrum are discussed.
We have carried out extensive series studies, at T=0 and at high temperatures, of two-chain and three-chain spin-half ladder systems with antiferromagnetic intrachain and both antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic interchain couplings. Our results confirm the existence of a gap in the two-chain Heisenberg ladders for all nonzero values of the interchain couplings. Complete dispersion relations for the spin-wave excitations are computed. For three-chain systems, our results are consistent with a gapless spectrum. We also calculate the uniform magnetic susceptibility and specific heat as a function of temperature. We find that as T\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0, for the two-chain system the uniform susceptibility goes rapidly to zero, whereas for the three-chain system it approaches a finite value. These results are compared in detail with previous studies of finite systems. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
We construct a field-theoretic description of two coupled spin-1 Heisenberg chains, starting with the known representation of a single spin-1 chain in terms of Majorana fermions (or Ising models). After reexamining the bosonization rules for two Ising models, taking particular care of order and disorder operators, we obtain a bosonic description of the spin-1 ladder. From renormalization-group and mean-field arguments, we conclude that, for a small interchain coupling, the spin-1 ladder is approximately described by three decoupled, two-frequency sine-Gordon models. We then predict that, starting with decoupled chains, the spin gap decreases linearly with interchain coupling, in both the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic directions. Finally, we discuss the possibility of an incommensurate phase in the spin-1 zigzag chain.