Fractional spinon excitations in the quantum Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chain
By M. Mourigal, M. Enderle, A. Klöpperpieper, J. Caux, A. Stunault, H. Rønnow. Nature Physics, 2013
275 citations recorded by the source corpus.
One of the simplest quantum many-body systems is the spin-1/2 Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chain, a linear array of interacting magnetic moments. Its exact ground state is a macroscopic singlet entangling all spins in the chain. Its elementary excitations, called spinons, are fractional spin-1/2 quasiparticles created and detected in pairs by neutron scattering. Theoretical predictions show that two-spinon states exhaust only 71% of the spectral weight and higher-order spinon states, yet to be experimentally located, are predicted to participate in the remaining. Here, by accurate absolute normalization of our inelastic neutron scattering data on a spin-1/2 Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chain compound, we account for the full spectral weight to within 99(8)%. Our data thus establish and quantify the existence of higher-order spinon states. The observation that, within error bars, the experimental line shape resembles a rescaled two-spinon one with similar boundaries allows us to develop a simple picture for understanding multi-spinon excitations. Magnetic excitations, or spinons, in a quasi-one-dimensional quantum magnet are investigated in an inelastic neutron-scattering experiment. The measurements confirm the existence of theoretically predicted higher-order spinons.
Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/574a960b0f48035f5359eeda1e10c6c192a159ca
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In Condensed Matter Physics
In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
Citations in the corpus
- Measuring multipartite entanglement through dynamic susceptibilities (2015, background): “, via incoherent elastic or phonon scattering [45], allowing neutron scattering with current instrumentation to account for 99(8)% of the spectral weight [46].”
- Antiferromagnetic spintronics (2016, background): “Other exotic quantum phases include fractional spinon excitations in CuSO4 (Mourigal et al., 2013), quantum criticality (Lake et al., 2005; Merchant et al., 2014), and Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons in antiferromagnetic dimers such as TlCuCl3 halide (Nikuni et al., 2000; Giamarchi, Rüegg, and”
- Dynamics of a Two-Dimensional Quantum Spin Liquid: Signatures of Emergent Majorana Fermions and Fluxes (2013, background): “Just as in the analogous case of the Heisenbe rg chain [20], where integrability is imperfect in reality but all qualitative features are well-observed experimentally, s o we similarly expect quantitative changes such as a small degre e of smearing out of theδ-function response or a more gradual ons”