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arXiv:cond-mat/9701093

Can Majorana Fermions correctly describe the ordered state of an antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain?

D. Foerster

Published Jan 14, 1997• 0 citations
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Abstract

To check the reliability of the Majorana representation of quantum spin systems, we use it to compute the ground state energy of an antiferromagnetic spin 1/2 chain to one loop order. We find a very small one loop correction of the mean field energy and a discrepancy of >100% compared to the Bethe Ansatz result. We conclude that a careful handling of the gauge degrees of freedom of this representation is crucial to get correct results.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.cond-mat/9701093

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To check the reliability of the Majorana representation of quantum spin systems, we use it to compute the ground state energy of an antiferromagnetic spin 1/2 chain to one loop order. We find a very small one loop correction of the mean field energy and a discrepancy of >100% compared to the Bethe Ansatz result. We conclude that a careful handling of the gauge degrees of freedom of this representation is crucial to get correct results.
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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.
We study a rotation invariant Majorana fermion model in one dimension using diagrammatic perturbation theory and numerical diagonalization of small systems. The model is inspired by a Majorana representation of the antiferromagnetic spin-1/2 chain, and it is similar in form to the t-J model of electrons, except that the Majorana fermions carry spin-1 and Z_2 charge. We discuss the implications of our results for the low-energy excitations of the spin-1/2 chain. We also discuss a generalization of our model from 3 species of Majorana fermions to N species; the SO(4) symmetric model is particularly interesting.
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