Classical spin dynamics based on SU($N$) coherent states

Abstract

We introduce a classical limit of the dynamics of quantum spin systems based on coherent states of SU($N$), where $N$ is the dimension of the local Hilbert space. This approach, that generalizes the well-known Landau-Lifshitz dynamics from SU(2) to SU($N$), provides a better approximation to the exact quantum dynamics for a large class of realistic spin Hamiltonians, including $S \geq 1$ systems with large single-ion anisotropy and weakly-coupled multi-spin units, such as dimers or trimers. We illustrate this idea by comparing the spin structure factors of a single-ion $S=1$ model that are obtained with the SU(2) and SU(3) classical spin dynamics against the exact solution.