Longitudinal Excitations in Bipartite and Hexagonal Antiferromagnetic Spin Lattices

Abstract

Based on our recently proposed magnon-density-waves using the microscopic many-body approach, we investigate the longitudinal excitations in quantum antiferromagnets by including the second order corrections in the large-$s$ expansion. The longitudinal excitation spectra for a general spin quantum number using the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg Hamiltonian are obtained for various spin lattice models. For bipartite lattice models, we find that the numerical results for the energy gaps for the longitudinal modes at $q\to0$ and the magnetic ordering wavevector $\bf Q$ are reduced by about $40-50\%$ after including the second order corrections. Thus, our estimate of the energy gaps for the quasi-one-dimensional (quasi-1D) antiferromagnetic compound KCuF$_3$ is in better agreement with the experimental result. For the quasi-1D antiferromagnets on hexagonal lattices, the full excitation spectra of both the transverse modes (i.e., magnons) and the longitudinal modes are obtained as functions of the nearest-neighbor coupling and the anisotropy constants. We find two longitudinal modes due to the non-collinear nature of the triangular antiferromagnetic order, similar to that of the phenomenological field theory approach by Affleck. We compare our results for the longitudinal energy gaps at the magnetic wavevectors with the experimental results for several antiferromagnetic compounds with both integer and non-integer spin quantum numbers, and also find good agreement after the higher-order contributions are included in our calculations.