Spin Tunneling, Berry phases and Doped Antiferromagnets

Abstract

Interference effects between Berry phase factors in spin tunneling systems have been discussed in recent Letters by Loss, DiVincenzo and Grinstein and von Delft and Henley. This Comment points out that Berry phases in spin tunneling are important in another interesting case: the two dimensional doped antiferromagnet. I show that the dispersion of a single hole in the t-J model changes sign as $e^{2πs}$ where $s$ is the size of the spins. This provides an interpretation of the numerical results for the $s=\half$ model, and a prediction for other spin sizes.