Solitons and magnon bound states in ferromagnetic Heisenberg chains

Abstract

We investigate the relation between magnon, magnon bound states, and the classical soliton solutions in the isotropic, the anisotropic-exchange, and the easy-axis ferromagnetic Heisenberg chains. The Dyson-Maleev boson representation is used to study the interaction between magnons, and bound states are investigated in terms of two-spin Green's functions. For easy-axis and anisotropic-exchange magnets, a mapping to the Bose gas with attractive -function interactions is established, and it yields the eigenvalues of the magnon and the mth bound state in the weak-coupling and continuum limits. The classical limit of the two-spin Green's function reveals that, to leading order in temperature, the bound-state resonance and the associated effects on the two-magnon continuum survives. An important result is a T2 dependence of the "binding" energy of the bound-state resonance. As a consequence, in a classical description the bound states enter only in order T2. Finally, we quantize the soliton solutions according to the Bohr-Sommerfeld and de Broglie rules. This approach is found to be exact for the s=12 isotropic Heisenberg chain and for sufficiently small wave numbers for all s values. In the anisotropic-exchange and easy-axis models, it agrees with the results obtained from the mapping on the Bose gas, for large quantum numbers and in the easy-axis case for s12 in addition. On this basis, we conclude that the envelope solitons considered here lead to bound-state resonances and associated effects in a classical treatment. Moreover, their semiclassical quantization gives remarkably accurate energy levels. © 1981 The American Physical Society.