We begin with a review of the antiferromagnetic spin 1/2 Heisenberg chain. In particular, we show that the model has particle-like excitations with spin 1/2, and we compute the exact bulk S matrix. We then review our recent work which generalizes these results. We first consider an integrable alternating spin 1/2 - spin 1 chain. In addition to having excitations with spin 1/2, this model also has excitations with spin 0. We compute the bulk S matrix, which has some unusual features. We then consider the open antiferromagnetic spin 1/2 Heisenberg chain with boundary magnetic fields. We give a direct calculation of the boundary S matrix. (Talk presented at the conference on Statistical Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory at USC, 16 - 21 May 1994)
Motivated by recent experiments on chemically synthesized magnetic molecular chains, we investigate the lowest-lying energy band of short spin-
s antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chains focusing on effects of open boundaries. By numerical diagonalization we find that the Land\'e pattern in the energy levels, i.e., $E(S)\ensuremath{\propto}S(S+1)$ for total spin
S, known from, e.g., ring-shaped nanomagnets, can be recovered in odd-membered chains, while strong deviations are found for the lowest excitations in chains with an even number of sites. This particular even-odd effect in the short Heisenberg chains cannot be explained by simple effective Hamiltonians and symmetry arguments. We go beyond these approaches, taking into account quantum fluctuations by means of a path-integral description and the valence bond basis, but the resulting quantum edge-spin picture which is known to work well for long chains does not agree with the numerical results for short chains and cannot explain the even-odd effect. Instead, by analyzing also the classical chain model, we show that spatial fluctuations dominate the physical behavior in short chains, with length $N\ensuremath{\lesssim}{e}^{\ensuremath{\pi}s}$, for any spin
s. Such short chains are found to display a unique behavior, which is not related to the thermodynamic limit and cannot be described well by theories developed for this regime.
Linear Heisenberg antiferromagnets (HAFs) are chains of spin-
S sites with isotropic exchange
J between neighbors. Open and periodic boundary conditions return the same ground-state energy per site in the thermodynamic limit, but not the same spin
SG when $S\ensuremath{\ge}1$. The ground state of open chains of
N spins has
SG=0 or
S, respectively, for even or odd
N. Density-matrix renormalization-group calculations with different algorithms for even and odd
N are presented up to
N=500 for the energy and spin densities $\ensuremath{\rho}(r,N)$ of edge states in HAFs with
S=1, 3/2, and 2. The edge states are boundary-induced spin density waves (BI-SDWs) with $\ensuremath{\rho}(r,N)\ensuremath{\propto}{(\ensuremath{-}1)}^{r\ensuremath{-}1}$ for
r=1,2,...,N. The SDWs are in phase when
N is odd, are out of phase when
N is even, and have finite excitation energy $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Gamma}}(N)$ that decreases exponentially with
N for integer
S and faster than
1/N for half integer
S. The spin densities and excitation energy are quantitatively modeled for integer
S chains longer than $5\ensuremath{\xi}$ spins by two parameters, the correlation length $\ensuremath{\xi}$ and the SDW amplitude, with $\ensuremath{\xi}=6.048$ for
S=1 and 49.0 for
S=2. The BI-SDWs of
S=3/2 chains are not localized and are qualitatively different for even and odd
N. Exchange between the ends for odd
N is mediated by a delocalized effective spin in the middle that increases $|\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Gamma}}(N)|$ and weakens the size dependence. The nonlinear sigma model ($\mathrm{NL}\ensuremath{\sigma}\mathrm{M}$) has been applied to the HAFs, primarily to
S=1 with even
N, to discuss spin densities and exchange between localized states at the ends as $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Gamma}}(N)\ensuremath{\propto}{(\ensuremath{-}1)}^{N}exp(\ensuremath{-}N/\ensuremath{\xi})$.
S=1 chains with odd
N are fully consistent with the $\mathrm{NL}\ensuremath{\sigma}\mathrm{M}$;
S=2 chains have two gaps $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Gamma}}(N)$ with the same $\ensuremath{\xi}$ as predicted whose ratio is 3.45 rather than 3; the $\mathrm{NL}\ensuremath{\sigma}\mathrm{M}$ is more approximate for
S=3/2 chains with even
N and is modified for exchange between ends for odd
N.