We calculate energies and wave functions of S=1 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chains with single-ion anisotropy in a symmetry-breaking external magnetic field. From results for the string correlation function for low-lying excited states we identify these states as solitons with respect to the hidden string order. For finite anisotropic chains we investigate the transition to the fully magnetized state at high magnetic fields and conclude that Bose condensation in an external magnetic field occurs also for the anisotropic chain.
We study magnetic excitations for anisotropic spin dimer systems. We present a theory that describes not only the lowest-lying excitation mode but also higher-lying modes of the spin dimers, where the latter modes are important for quantum phase transitions driven by magnetic field and pressure in spin-gapped systems. As the most intriguing application, we calculate electron spin resonance (ESR) intensity in the presence of Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya (DM) interaction, which couples the local triplet with the singlet states of the dimer. The ESR intensities under various configurations of the DM interactions are reported in both disordered and field-induced ordered phases, which are very useful for the analysis of high-field ESR data.
Antiferromagnetic spin-1 chains host the celebrated symmetry-protected topological Haldane phase, whose spin-
1/2 edge states were evidenced in bulk by, e.g., electron spin resonance (ESR). To fully reveal and manipulate the spin-
1/2 degree of freedom, one may build on the recent success in assembling effective spin-1 antiferromagnetic chains from nanographene and porphyrin molecules, and on the nascent technique of combined ESR and scanning tunneling microscopy, which is able to measure the spin dynamics site by site with atomic real-space resolution. In this Letter, we combine exact diagonalization and density matrix renormalization group to investigate the local dynamic spin structure factor of the different phases of the bilinear-biquadratic Hamiltonian with single-ion anisotropy in the presence of an external magnetic field. We find that the signature of the Haldane phase is a low-energy peak created by singlet-triplet transitions in the edge-state manifold. We predict that the signature peak is experimentally observable, although for chains of length above
N=30 its energy should be first tuned by application of an external magnetic field. We fully characterize the peak in real space and energy, and further show its robustness to weak anisotropy and a relevant range of temperatures.